Comparativa entre modelos estocásticos de crecimiento bacteriano a distintas escalas

Abstract

Quality and safety in the food industry, as well as the processes involved in the production, packaging, and transport of food, may be optimised using predictive microbiology. This discipline models the behaviour of microorganisms and uses the socalled primary models to describe bacterial growth. One of the main challenges consists of explaining and simulating the growth when the number of initial bacteria (inoculum) is reduced because of the stochastic behaviour. There exist different alternatives to modelling such stochastic processes depending on: (1) the required level of detail for the solution; (2) the computational time; and (3) the possibility of estimating parameters from fast and inexpensive measurements. In this work, we compare the solutions, computational times and structural identifiability obtained using different alternatives: (1) microscopic scale considering individual-based models; and (2) mesoscopic scale considering the modified Fokker-Planck equation