A Hybrid Edge Cloud Digital Twin for Welfare-Constrained Control in Poultry Production

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.