Industry 4.0-based smart systems in aquaculture: A comprehensive review

The Aquaculture industry is a sector that faces difficulties in maintaining a high-quality production of food in a sustainable way due to the technological limitations of the commercial tools and the lack of integration of systems and sensors that can monitor the environmental variables and physiological characteristics of the animals. In most aquaculture farms, human operators are still responsible for collecting data manually and over long time intervals. In this way, management and decision-making depends on the operator's experience and can be negatively affected by human subjectivity. The application of Industry 4.0 concepts to collect and store data in real time using interconnected sensors and other automated equipment allows to increase the accuracy of the farm's operation and support faster and evidence-based decisions. This work presents an overview of some Industry 4.0-based approaches used to improve the quality, productivity and sustainability of the aquaculture industry. Initially, the Industry 4.0 definition and main concepts are presented as well as the consequences of its implementation for the improvement of general industrial processes. Following that, the current scenario of the aquaculture industry in terms of global food production and the main limitations of the sector that can be supported by intelligent systems to improve results are presented. In the next sections, specific technologies such as camera systems for animal and environmental monitoring, sensing networks and IoT to collect, transmit and store data, automated devices to support some activities and monitoring tasks, tools to support data interpretation and decision-making and modern sensing strategies for hard-to-monitor parameters are detailed. This review article shows the feasibility of using the aforementioned technologies to improve results of the aquaculture industry and, due to its advantages, it is believed that its widespread use can fill the existing gaps in this field of research in the next years.