Planetary digital twin: a case study in aquaculture.

Precision agriculture and aquaculture offer a new way of creating a production system that is efficient and eco-friendly with the potential to increase food availability to wider communities across the globe. Digital technologies and applied computing play a crucial role to aid local farmers in better control of production losses. This paper addresses whether it is feasible to deploy a virtual digital replica of aquaculture farms to control essential water quality variables, including temperature, dissolved oxygen (DO), pH, turbidity and ammonia. Traditional IoT systems can offer monitoring capabilities. However, this emerging application requires real-time control-based actuation to intervene in the environment. Often, farmers have limited time to react to any anomalous event. The proposed Planetary Digital Twin employs AI-based control loops to monitor, simulate and optimize aquaculture processes and assets. Preliminary system validation results suggest the approach is feasible in communicating real-time sensor data to a mechanism to detect and control anomalies.