Towards automated aquaponics: A review on monitoring, IoT, and smart systems

Aquaponics is a farming method that promises to be a good alternative against the food and environmental problem the world is facing. It is a combination between aquaculture (farming of fish) and hydroponics (growing plants without soil), being a technique to grow plants with the aquaculture effluent. This technique claims to have high water use efficiency, does not use pesticides and reduce the use of fertilizers, which make this technology green and sustainable. Since the interest in aquaponics is increasing, the major challenge is to do it feasible and reliable at commercial scale. The concept of precision farming usually applied in the traditional farming sense is now being introduced, leading to the need to adopt sensing, smart and IoT systems for monitoring and control of its automated processes. Lately, valuable contributions have been made towards the introduction of fully and semi-automated systems in small-scale aquaponics systems by automation and manufacturing experts. This paper aims to support research towards a viable commercial aquaponics solution by identifying, listing, and providing an in-depth explanation of each of the parameters sensed in aquaponics, and the smart systems and IoT technologies in the reviewed literature. Further, the proposed review highlights potential gaps in the research literature and future contributions to be made in regards of automated aquaponics solutions.