Tools for sensitivity analysis in bioprocessing

Abstract

The domain of bioprocessing and industry of biotechnology is evolving. Remarkable progress in recent time has already brought the industry into a stage of growth. As a result of this, many biotechnological products, foods, and agricultural products are being commercialized. Therefore, there is a transition from research work in the laboratory to the market. In this consequence, bioprocess engineering covers the area from development to the actual production. Different parts of the discipline are being studied and still going on in order to make revenue. Thus, the revenue is concerned, it is important to identify critical phases, uncertain variables involved in those phases, and degree of sensitivity of those uncertain variables. Identifying those variables that plays vital role in production cost makes the decision makers tasks easier. When the key variables have been determined, then the decision makers know where to focus more and analyze further. In this thesis, we have developed a tool from an existing software platform called Bioptima planner to analyze and identify different sources of uncertainty, uncertain variables, and their level of uncertainty and sensitivity regarding the final production cost. When significant uncertain variables whose impacts are bigger in the cost have been determined, then the decision makers’ tasks become obvious to analyze those variables and leave the less important ones. A case study i.e. Probiotic example is used to demonstrate the applicability of the tool. It produces graphical representation of the results using histogram, tornado diagram, and violin plot which serves our purpose of decision making in the context of sensitivity analysis. Significant differences in sensitivities were found among the variables due to different properties of them and the probability distributions applied to them.