A digital twin (DT) system is a virtual system that can provide a comprehensive description of a real physical system. The DT system continuously receives data from physical sensors and user input information and provides information feedback to the physical system. It is an emerging technology that utilizes an advanced Internet of Things (IoT) to connect different objects, which is in high demand in various industries and its research literature is growing exponentially. Traditional physical systems provide data support for the monitoring of physical objects such as buildings through digital modeling techniques, data acquisition tools, human computer interfaces, and building information models (BIM). However, DT can offer much more than data presentation. DT uses the received data to perform operations such as analysis, prediction, and simulation, and finally transmits the analysis results to the physical system as feedback. Compared with other physical systems, DT has the characteristics of bidirectional data exchange and real-time autonomous management. The plant factory control system based on digital twin technology continuously measures the power consumption of electrical equipment through the sensors of the physical system and makes the corresponding virtual color-coded gradient map based on the obtained data. The darker the virtual device is, the more power it currently requires, and just based on the shade of color gives the user a very intuitive idea of the current power usage of the electronic device. There has been extensive research on digital twin technology, but there are few studies on implementing plant factories based on digital twin technology. This paper proposes the idea of combining digital twin technology with plant factories to provide research directions for future smart agriculture. It proves that smart agricultural production with sustainability can also benefit from this idea.

Insulators of the kind used for overhead transmission lines institute important kinds of insulation control, namely, electrical insulation and mechanical fixing. Because of their large exposure to the environment, they are affected by factors such as climate, temperature, durability, the easy occurrence of explosions, damage, the threat of going missing, and other faults. These seriously influence the safety of the power transmission, so insulation monitoring must be conducted. With the development of unmanned technology, the staff used unmanned aircraft to take aerial photos of the detected insulators, and the insulator images were obtained by naked eye observation. Although this method looks very reliable, in practice, due to the large quantity of insulator-collected seismic data, and the complex background, workers are usually relying on their experience to make judgements, so it is easy for mistakes to appear. In recent years, with the rapid development of computer technology, more and more attention has been paid to fault detection and identification in insulators by computer-aided workers. In order to improve the detection accuracy of self-exploding insulators, especially in bad weather environments, and to overcome the influence of fog on target detection, a regression attention convolutional neural network is used for optimization. Through the recursive operation of multi-scale attention, multi-scale feature information is connected in series, the regional focus is recursively generated from coarse to fine, and the target region is detected to achieve optimal results. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively improve the fault diagnosis ability of insulators. Compared with the accuracy of other basic models, such as FCAN and MG-CNN, the accuracy of RA-CNN in multi-layer cascade optimization is higher than that in the previous two models, which is 74.9% and 75.6%, respectively. In addition, the results of the ablation experiments at different scales showed that the identification results of different two-level combinations were 78.2%, 81.4%, and 83.6%, and the accuracy of selecting three-level combinations was up to 85.3%, which was significantly higher than the other models.

In this study, we propose an intelligent drinking water controller based on programmable logic controller (PLC) specifically designed for pig breeding, which significantly reduces the water waste caused by the use of traditional drinking bowls by regulating the frequency and flow of water release. In addition, the drinking water system has a tracking and recording function, which can record the frequency and duration with which fattening pigs drink water in each pen in detail, thus providing farmers with a wealth of pig health and behavior data to help optimize breeding management decisions. In order to deeply analyze the effects of the intelligent drinking water controller on the growth, resources environment and economic benefits of fattening pigs under the condition of large-scale breeding, a single factor comparison experiment was designed.In this experiment, 84 fattening pigs were selected and distributed in 12 pens. Among them, six pens were randomly designated as the control group;the pig in this group used ordinary drinking water bowls for the water supply. The other six pens were designated as the experimental group;the pigs in this group used the intelligent drinking water controller. The experimental results showed that in the experimental group with the intelligent drinking water controller, the average daily water waste per finishing pig was only 0.186 L (p < 0.05), accounting for only 25.98% of the average daily water waste per pig in the control group (p < 0.05). In terms of water quality, the intelligent drinking water controller also showed better performance, and the performance indicators were effectively reduced, with the highest reduction reaching 39.86%, which greatly reduced water pollution. Compared with the traditional drinking bowl, the average daily weight increment of fattening pigs in the pen using the intelligent drinking water controller was increased by 0.02 kg. In terms of long-term benefits, the PLC-based intelligent drinking water controller significantly improves the economic returns of the farm and has a positive impact on pig health. The high frequency data collection of the pigs’ drinking habits through the intelligent drinking water controller can also provide data support for the subsequent establishment of a pig water-drinking behavior analysis model.

The journal retracts the article titled “Research on the Interface of Sustainable Plant Factory Based on Digital Twin”