Process management system of automatic decision making for aquaculture based on Activiti and Drools

At present, there exist a series of problems in the process management of aquaculture, including inefficient process management, inexplicit aquaculture business rules, low efficiency of decision-making and high failure rate of operation by human experiences. In order to solve those problems, this study targets to develop an enhanced process management system for the automatic decision making of aquaculture. The theoretical foundation of the proposed system is to integrate rule engine technology with the traditional workflow systems. Although workflow technology can realize the automatic process management and improve the work efficiency, it performs worse in automatic business decision-making. There exist substantial decisions during the process of aquaculture, which can determine the right next-step operation. Rule engine can separate business rules from the application program, and assist workflow system to conduct automatic decision-making and dynamic scheduling of the business process. Based on this theoretical foundation, the architecture of an intelligent workflow management system based on rule engine was proposed, which implemented the idea of interaction and bidirectional driving between workflow engine and rule engine. To further examine the rationale of the proposed system, this study used the case of Penaeus Vannamei breeding to customize the process management system. First, the characteristics of the business process of Penaeus Vannamei breading, including complex and inexplicit steps, being constrained by time, multiple cycles, multiple concurrency and substantial business decisions, were analyzed and summarized. Next, the breeding process of Penaeus vannamei were defined and designed through the Activiti visualization process designer based on the development of workflow model of aquaculture. Then, the analysis, definition, design, compilation and triggering of the business rules in the key breeding processes of Penaeus Vannamei were established through the Drools rule engine. Finally, though integrating Activiti workflow engine and Drools rule engine with the mainstream SSH framework, the process management system of automatic decision making for Penaeus vannamei based on Activiti and Drools was developed by the tool of Eclipse3.7 integrated with the plug-in components of Activiti5.22 and Drools5.6. The process management system followed the three-layer system architecture and programmed by JAVA language and MySQL database. Although compared with the traditional aquaculture management system, the proposed process management system performed superior in process management and automatic decision making, it can still run efficiently. Because the velocity of decision-making by Drools rule engine was not affected by the number of the business rules, no matter how many breeding rules there were, the process management system could always make automatic decisions with an average of 3.5 s and the accuracy rate reached up to 100%. Currently, the process management system had been partially applied by an aquaculture company in Nantong and the company had completed the contrast test in system pilot run. The results of the comparative experiment had demonstrated that the system could effectively realize the real-time supervision and control of the whole-process business state of aquaculture, and quickly and accurately make the automatic decisions of the breeding business rules. Compared with the shrimp pond controlled by the traditional feeding system, the shrimp pond controlled by the process management system increased the yield of aquaculture by 14.8%, reduced the feed coefficient by 11.4%, reduced the labor cost by 30%, and increased the total profit by 29.3%. Thus, this study provides an automatic, streamlined and fine management method for the process management of aquaculture.