Precision livestock farming for cattle, sustainability and animal welfare

The work planned by the Operative Group focuses on the application of PLF (Precision Livestock Farming) systems to achieve animal welfare models, through research into new cyber-physical systems based on the concept of the Internet of Things aimed at monitoring, in real time, the behaviour and response of animals in intensive bovine farms.

The aim is also to implement management and handling methodologies that use sensors and information technologies to monitor and optimise the contribution of each animal to production, health, environmental impact, energy expenditure and well-being in real time. Data is collected, processed and analysed so that it can be applied to improving feeding, animal welfare and the environmental impact of farms, and to achieve a digital transformation in the agricultural and rural sector.

These also include some specific ones such as: defining new cyber-physical systems with software and hardware architectures suitable for their implementation in animals, researching and implementing animal behavior and response models based on data obtained from the proposed cyber-physical systems, and proposing predictive models based on the application of genetic algorithms for their implementation in Precision Livestock Farming (PLF).