Modelling Electricity Consumption in Irish Dairy Farms Using Agent-Based Modelling
This addresses energy management for dairy farm owners and providers, but is incremental as it applies a known modeling approach to a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of estimating electricity consumption on Irish dairy farms by developing an agent-based model that accounts for factors like herd size and milking machines, and validated it against existing frameworks.
Dairy farming can be an energy intensive form of farming. Understanding the factors affecting electricity consumption on dairy farms is crucial for farm owners and energy providers. In order to accurately estimate electricity demands in dairy farms, it is necessary to develop a model. In this research paper, an agent-based model is proposed to model the electricity consumption of Irish dairy farms. The model takes into account various factors that affect the energy consumption of dairy farms, including herd size, number of milking machines, and time of year. The outputs are validated using existing state-of-the-art dairy farm modelling frameworks. The proposed agent-based model is fully explainable, which is an advantage over other Artificial Intelligence techniques, e.g. deep learning.