The use of free‐choice profiling for the evaluation of commercial ports

Abstract

The paper describes a new approach to profile analysis in which each assessor produces individual profiles of the products, using his or her own terms for describing them without the need to explain the meaning of such terms. The spatial configurations derived from individual profiles are rationalised by generalised Procrustes statistics. The result is a consensus configuration revealing the interrelationships between the samples for the panel as a whole. An experiment conducted on commercial ports using ten assessors, both expert and non-expert, illustrates the technique.