MELISSA Food Database: A Mean to Fit Diet Requirements to BLSS Products

When a balanced diet of a crew is supposed to come from a biogenerative life support system (BLSS), such as MELISSA, it is necessary to conceive a “food management” system in order to match the food production capability of the LSS to the needs of the crew. The objective of this work is the development of a database including crew constraints, food production and preparation constraints, BLSS constraints (mass, crew time, energy consumption) as well as the nutritional data on food and dishes, with the aim to elaborate a selection of possible menus and recipes which satisfy nutritional requirements and acceptability over a long period for a crew. The database is managed by a web client interface developed in PHP, and the whole was called “MELiSSA Food Database” as MELiSSA was used to define the food production (i.e plants) capability of the BLSS.