Developing an expert system for architectural designing of dairy farms

Dairy farming operations in Turkey are mostly insufficient in terms of herd management applications and physical infrastructure, animal welfare and efficient labor utilization thusly they have low productivity. That's why sustainable and highly productive dairy farming operations require architectural designs, which take the animal welfare into account, are appropriate for correct herding and management applications and animal behavior and allow effective labor, for the barns and other service buildings. In this study, an expert system program named "Architectural Designing of Dairy Farms" has been developed in orderto meet such requirements in a dairy farm to be built under mild climate conditions and to determine their status in existing farms. Initially, ten modules with ensured input-output relations have been developed for the said program. They are as follows; 1) Herd size and makeup, 2) Herd management plan, 3) Architectural design of young animal barns, 4) Architectural design of milking cows pens, 5) Architectural design of special needs pens, 6) Architectural design of barn systems, 7) Architectural design of milking parlor, 8) Architectural design of manure storage, 9) Architectural design of feed storages and 10) Farmstead layout modules. Then, algorithms for architectural design have been developed for each module. Then, the expert system has been turned into a computer program with 15 interfaces through Visual Basic 6.0 object-based programming language. Programs inputs are; number of dairy animals and milking duration while the outputs are; herding and management plans, architectural designs of barns and other service buildings. Lastly, for 250 dairy animals and 3 hours of milking duration, an example operation has been generated. This example operation has been drawn in AutoCAD 2017 program according to the results obtained. Keywords:Dairy farm, animal welfare, architectural design, expert system.