PigInvest: A digital decision support tool for the pig industry based on bio-economic stochastic simulation models

Description:
This proposed commercialisation project aims to create a new spin-out company that will develop PigInvest, a decision support tool (DST) for pig farms to help service providers to the pig industry (e.g. geneticists, nutritionists, equipment suppliers, veterinary practices, independent consultants) to solve the problem of a lack of an integrated DST capable to accurately estimate the benefit of their services in farm performance and profit with our a holistic user-friendly DST. PigInvest simultaneously integrates various aspects of pig production imulates the impact of on-farm changes prior implementation under farm specific conditions. The problem of an absence of an integrated DST for pig production systems, is experienced by service providers to the pig industry giving expert technical support to accurately estimate economic benefit of their services under farm specific conditions. Currently, service providers try to solve this by using a wide range of existing piecemeal DST (with offline in-house solutions based on Microsoft Excel being particularly common) that do not interact with each other, lack the capability to integrate biological and economic aspects of pig production into a single piece of software and accurately reflect impact of proposed changes under farm specific conditions. The project aims to develop a holistic user-friendly DST based on bio-economic modelling which will have the following innovative features: PigInvest is agnostic to the pig industry, meaning that it integrates different aspects of pig production by using a whole farm modelling approach PigInvest uses data and assumptions from individual farms providing tailored information to each specific user PigInvest provides a wide range of physical and financial outputs including annualised profit and loss accounts, cash flows, balance sheets, risk analysis and risk assessment through scenario testing.