Towards Smart Aquaculture: AI-Based Monitoring and Management Systems

Aquaculture has emerged as a vital solution to meet the growing global demand for protein-rich food, highlighting its critical importance for global food security and economic development. Despite this progress, traditional aquaculture practices depend heavily on manual labor, subjective decision-making, and limited automation, resulting in operational inefficiencies, increased production costs, and challenges related to sustainability and animal welfare. In response, the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation technologies is reshaping aquaculture by enabling smart, data-driven management systems. This review examines recent advances in AI-based applications across major aquaculture operations, including intelligent feeding management, automated growth monitoring, real-time water quality assessment, disease detection, and post-harvest processing and quality evaluation. These innovations support more precise control of production variables, reduce feed waste, improve environmental management, enhance early disease prevention, and increase product uniformity and yield in seafood processing. Thus, this study highlights recent advances in AI-driven aquaculture, emphasizing its potential to transform traditional practices into intelligent, adaptive, and sustainable systems. The findings suggest that AI will play a central role in shaping the future of precision aquaculture and blue economy development.