Time Series Forecast Model Application for Broiler Weight Prediction using Environmental Factors

Predicting the growth of broiler chickens is an essential task in the poultry industry. The data used in the study include both the production environmental indicators (temperature, gas concentration, humidity, and others) and the growth rates of poultry (weight, amount of feed consumed, fall) by analyzing their correlations throughout several production cycles. The proposed approach includes several stages, starting with data pre-processing, broiler weight data augmentation, comparison with a reference model, definition, and detection of uncomfortable and dangerous environmental conditions. For the model-building part, the Long short-term memory (LSTM) artificial neural network is applied. The validation of the forecasting model is done by comparing the forecasted weight provided by the model with the actual weight measurements during the randomly selected bird life cycle and varied environmental conditions. The acquired results showed that the provided forecast accuracy is sufficient for production management.