IUMENTA: A generic framework for animal digital twins within the Open Digital Twin Platform

TL;DR

The application of the IUMENTA framework is explored in developing a digital twin focused on the animal's energy balance, which includes the EnergyTag system, a state-of-the-art wearable software sensor, allowing for continuous updates and personalisation of the energy balance digital twin.

Abstract

IUMENTA (Latin for livestock) is an innovative software framework designed to construct and simulate digital twins of animals. By leveraging the powerful capability of the Open Digital Twin Platform (ODTP) alongside advanced software sensors, IUMENTA offers researchers a user-friendly tool to seamlessly develop adaptive digital replicas of animal-based processes. This framework establishes a dynamic ecosystem that integrates insights from diverse experiments, consequently enhancing our understanding of animal behavioural and physiological responses. Through real-time tracking of an animal's energy balance. IUMENTA provides valuable insights into metabolic rates, nutritional needs, emotional states, and overall well-being of animals. In this article, we explore the application of the IUMENTA framework in developing a digital twin focused on the animal's energy balance. IUMENTA includes the EnergyTag system, a state-of-the-art wearable software sensor, which facilitates real-time monitoring of energy expenditure, allowing for continuous updates and personalisation of the energy balance digital twin.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: Illustration depicts the animal digital twins (ADT) concept. Sensors collect data from the real twin (animal-based system) to update the digital replica (twin) of the system. ADT can be utilized for predictive maintenance to support decision-making, as a diagnostic tool for early detection of problems, and in silico experiments and what-if simulations.
• Figure 2: Software sensors facilitate the processing of complex animal data from raw sensors into semantically structured information. The software-defined sensors form the basis for the input in the energy expenditure calculation in the digital twin. Icons used with permission from flaticon authored by Freepik, kornkun, Octopocto, and Andrejs Kirma.
• Figure 3: The IUMENTA framework embedded in the Open Digital Twin Platform (ODTP). ODTP runs on a server in the cloud managing the digital twin. Locally, at the farm, ODTP maintains two services to receive the raw data and instantiate the software sensors. The data is then transferred to the cloud and the animal digital twin computes the energy expenditure and all data is visualised in a service running the python visualisation library pygwalker.
• Figure 4: The EnergyTag: A software Sensor for real-time monitoring of pig's dynamic energy expenditure. The EnergyTag comprises wearable integrated sensors (indicated by a red circle) designed to measure a number of auxiliary variables, including skin temperature, skin heat flux, ODBA (Overall Dynamic Body Acceleration), and heart rate. A fusion model (software) integrates sensor data to estimate the dynamic energy expenditure of animals.
• Figure 5: A random forest predicting the heat production of pigs based on the "EnergyTag" compared to a baseline aarts2024energytag. Image used with permission.