Agri digital twin–driven intelligent computing framework for real-time crop yield forecasting and sustainable decision support

In the context of climate change, resource constraints, and increasing food demand, sustainable agricultural systems must become more productive and efficient in their use of resources. The Internet of Things (IoT) sensing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are allowing data-driven agriculture, but a common platform for real-time prediction of crop yield and sustainable agricultural decision-making is still not available. We propose an Agri Digital Twin (ADT) framework that combines a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) model with an IoT-based sensing system for temporal crop yield prediction and climate-resilient farm management. The framework constantly updates soil and weather parameters in real time, such as soil moisture, air temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, wind gust, and wind direction, to create a real-time digital model of the crop field. The data collected is used to derive temporal features to predict yield, which are then categorized as low, medium, and high, and then further into sustainable, warning, and unsustainable to enable irrigation scheduling and crop stress management. The experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms the others by achieving the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.0243, Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.0459, and Coefficient of Determination ( R 2 ) of 0.9254. Furthermore, it achieves an average prediction accuracy of 97.41% (95% CI: 95.03%, 99.80%), representing improvements of 4.09%, 6.32%, and 8.66% over BiLSTM, LSTM, and 1D-CNN, respectively ( p < 0.05 ). The decision-support module also achieves a classification accuracy of 94.03%, showing its potential for sustainable and climate-resilient smart agriculture.