Bioprocess development for the production of biological drugs such as therapeutic proteins is made more difficult by the increasing complexity required to provide novel functionality. Furthermore, finding an appropriate bioprocess for a new biological drug is a challenging optimisation problem that is made more difficult by incomplete and inconsistent domain knowledge.

This interdisciplinary project brings together expertise in advanced bioprocess experimentation technology (Department of Biochemical Engineering) and in knowledge representation and reasoning technologies for handling incomplete and inconsistent knowledge using argumentation (Department of Computer Science). The aims of the project are (1) to extend existing work on logic-based systems for argumentation in order to reason with the search space of possible combinations of operating strategies in the production of a biomolecule, and (2) to build a prototype system for a restricted domain of bioprocess knowledge in order to evaluate the framework.