arXiv:2608.20367v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Poultry production operates under tightly coupled environmental and biological dynamics, yet commercial climate control remains largely heuristic, limiting welfare assurance and operational efficiency. We introduce an edge-cloud digital twin framework for real-time, welfare-constrained environmental control in poultry facilities. The framework integrates distributed sensing, on-device state estimation, a hybrid physics-data model, and model predictive control to enable anticipatory and adaptive management under practical farm constraints. A grey-box thermodynamic and mass-balance formulation is augmented with a learned residual that captures unmodeled biological variability, including activity-dependent metabolic heat. This hybrid model is embedded within a state-space representation for real-time estimation and control at the edge, while cloud coordination supports cross-farm learning and long-horizon optimization. Bandwidth-aware processing and asynchronous synchronization enable deployment in connectivity-limited environments. Evaluation in a high-fidelity broiler production testbed demonstrates substantial gains over rule-based control and physics-only modeling. Temperature prediction error is reduced from 1.8 degrees Celsius to 0.4 degrees Celsius, ammonia constraint violations decrease by 90 percent, and communication requirements are lowered approximately 30-fold through edge-first processing. A Domain Transfer Score of 0.92 further indicates strong robustness across facility conditions. These results show that physically grounded digital twins, coupled with real-time control, enable scalable and welfare-aware management of biological production systems.
Abstract: Poultry production operates under tightly coupled environmental and biological dynamics, yet commercial climate control remains largely heuristic, limiting welfare assurance and operational efficiency. We introduce an edge-cloud digital twin framework for real-time, welfare-constrained environmental control in poultry facilities. The framework integrates distributed sensing, on-device state estimation, a hybrid physics-data model, and model predictive control to enable anticipatory and adaptive management under practical farm constraints. A grey-box thermodynamic and mass-balance formulation is augmented with a learned residual that captures unmodeled biological variability, including activity-dependent metabolic heat. This hybrid model is embedded within a state-space representation for real-time estimation and control at the edge, while cloud coordination supports cross-farm learning and long-horizon optimization. Bandwidth-aware processing and asynchronous synchronization enable deployment in connectivity-limited environments. Evaluation in a high-fidelity broiler production testbed demonstrates substantial gains over rule-based control and physics-only modeling. Temperature prediction error is reduced from 1.8 degrees Celsius to 0.4 degrees Celsius, ammonia constraint violations decrease by 90 percent, and communication requirements are lowered approximately 30-fold through edge-first processing. A Domain Transfer Score of 0.92 further indicates strong robustness across facility conditions. These results show that physically grounded digital twins, coupled with real-time control, enable scalable and welfare-aware management of biological production systems.
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