Sensor network based animals feeding and milk production management system

Abstract EN

In general, the animals’ feeding requires a lot of time and efforts spent by the cattlemen.

Part of the feeding amount is consumed by the animal to save its life and the other part is considered for instrumental milk production.

The type of food in addition to the number of feeding frequents are important factors in changing the amount of produced milk as well as the weight of an animal.

In this paper, we propose a control system that manage the forage process and the amount of produced milk by determining the quantity and number of feeding animals using sensor network.

The designed system includes two parts: allocated hardware and data center.

The hardware part consists of a microcontroller (ARDUINO Uno), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, level sensor, and Bluetooth HC-06.

Sensors send their real-time readings of the forage quantity of animals to the monitoring part of the system through the Bluetooth service and then save them in the database server.

RFID tags are used to recognize the cow types.

There are two types of cows considered in this paper depending on the amount of produced milk.

In the data center, the database is built using SQL server 2015 for storing the sensor readings and control signals of the proposed system.

While the related Graphical User Interface (GUI) frames is designed using Visual Studio C#.

The proposed system has been presented in a prototype to show forage process and resulted in a clear reduction in a daily cattlemen effort.

The proposed system has been tested over different scenarios and the obtained results show the efficiency in terms of management part and food saving part.