Study on fuzzy reasoning application for sensory evaluation of sausages

Fuzzy reasoning was applied to data from sensory evaluation of sausage. Sensory evaluation diagnostics were done in terms of sensory attributes such as texture, taste, odor, appearance, overall acceptability, and the contribution of each attribute to the overall acceptability. First, panelists were asked to rate the contribution level of each attribute to decide the overall acceptability as one out of five alternatives: “very important”, “important”, “moderate”, “slight”, and “very slight”. Simultaneously, the preference level of each attribute for sausage samples was also evaluated on a hedonic scale going from “excellent”, “good”, “fair”, “poor”, to “very poor”. The results of the evaluations were converted into fuzzy sets. The fuzzy sets for contribution weight and preference of the attributes were composed to infer the overall acceptability of sausage samples by fuzzy reasoning. The results of fuzzy reasoning well fitted the results from statistical analysis.