Enhancing Aquaponic Farming Efficiency with AI-Powered Nitrate Level Prediction

Temporal fusion transformer-based prediction in aquaponics

Aquaponics offers a soilless farming ecosystem by merging modern hydroponics with aquaculture. The fish food is provided to the aquaculture, and the ammonia generated by the fish is converted to nitrate using specialized bacteria, which is an essential resource for vegetation. Fluctuations in the ammonia levels affect the generated nitrate levels and influence farm yields. The sensor-based autonomous control of aquaponics can offer a highly rewarding solution, which can enable much more efficient ecosystems. Also, manual control of the whole aquaponics operation is prone to human error. Artificial Intelligence-powered Internet of Things solutions can reduce human intervention to a certain extent, realizing more scalable environments to handle the food production problem. In this research, an attention-based Temporal Fusion Transformers deep learning model was proposed and validated to forecast nitrate levels in an aquaponics environment. An aquaponics dataset with temporal features and a high number of input lines has been employed for validation and extensive analysis. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements of the proposed model over baseline models in terms of MAE, MSE, and Explained Variance metrics considering one-hour sequences. Utilizing the proposed solution can help enhance the automation of aquaponics environments.