Smart Agriculture and Sustainable Development in Agro-Ecosystems: Innovative Computational Modeling for Digital Twins

By boosting yields, improving efficiency, and reducing costs (while managing resources), digital technologies have driven innovation in agro-ecosystems in recent years. As a means to overcome ever-limited resources, Smart Agriculture – sometimes also referred to as Agriculture 4.0 – has increasingly leveraged digital solutions to achieve efficiency and sustainability. Digital twins in rural systems perform as computational (in silico) replicas of food production lines, which can drive innovation by enabling real-time optimization as well as predictive decision-making. Considering that both non-human and human actors are directly involved, this paper discusses (from a strategic alignment viewpoint) a prospective symbiotic ethos that farmers and ranchers may pursue when it comes to integrated, participatory and efficient transfer and usage of digital technology in rural activities. Bearing particularly in mind smallholders, challenges and opportunities for Smart Agriculture include: (i) implementation of hybrid in-house simulators of agro-ecosystems by suitably combining mechanistic modeling with data-driven simulation; (ii) use of dimensionless mathematical modeling to expedite scale-up, optimization, and translation of innovative digital technologies; and (iii) validating as well as transferring novel digital solutions in consideration of strategic issues identified by rural end-users.