An Evaluation Model with Unbalanced Linguistic Information Applied to Olive Oil Sensory Evaluation
L. Martínez, M. Espinilla, J. Liu, L. G. Pérez and P. J. Sánchez
The evaluation processes are used for quality inspection, marketing and other fields in industrial companies. This paper focuses on sensory evaluation where the evaluated items are assessed by a panel of experts according to the knowledge acquired via human senses. In these evaluation processes, the information provided by the experts implies uncertainty, vagueness and imprecision. The use of the Fuzzy Linguistic Approach [28] has provided successful results modelling such a type of information. Usually these evaluation processes based on linguistic approaches have used symmetrical and uniformly distributed linguistic term sets in order to model the preferences about the evaluated objects. However, in sensory evaluation is common to find problems whose items or features need to be assessed with assessments in scales that one side of the scale overweight the another one, it means the use of a unbalanced linguistic scale. In this paper we present a sensory evaluation model that manages evaluation frameworks with unbalanced linguistic information. This model will be applied to the sensory evaluation process of Olive Oil that implies the definition of a proper framework adapted to the preference modelling of the proposed evaluation model.
Keywords: Sensory evaluation, unbalanced linguistic term sets, linguistic hierarchies, linguistic information.