Résumé
The drying of paddy rice may result in quality degradation, expressed as a head kernel yield,leading to significant commercial depreciation of the product. A mathematical model of thedrying and of the quality degradation process was combined with a dynamic optimizationalgorithm to determine the drying conditions (air temperature and relative humidity asfunctions of time) that ensured the highest possible final product quality for a specified dryingtime and a specified final moisture content. The robustness of the optimal drying strategy withrespect to the initial state of the product, to the model parameters and to the initialization ofthe optimization algorithm was verified. The compromise between the highest achievablefinal quality and the allowed total drying time was studied. The combination of simulationand optimization yielded a new insight in the rice drying process and in the qualitypreservation strategies.