Information from On-line Live Weight Assessment for Optimal Selection of Slaughter Pigs for Market

One of the most labor intensive tasks of traditional slaughter pig production is the weighting of pigs for market. In an on-going project, methods for automatically assessing live weights through image analysis are being developed. Below, we present the framework of a farm level model to optimize selection of slaughter pigs for market. The optimization tool used in this study is a hierarchical Markov process. The state space is defined in such a way that observations from the online live weight estimation may serve as input for the decision support system. In that way the precision of the underlying predictions of future growth is improved. The aim is create a decision support being able to inform the farmer about the number of pigs that are ready for market per pen. The MLHMP software system will be used to implement the model.