A Low-Code Development Platform for Industrialized Insect-based Bioconversion Systems

Industrialized insect-based bioconversion is a technologically promising and economical viable approach for solving global crisis of food security and waste management. The successful implementation of such a multi-disciplinary system requires comprehensive expertise and skills from biotechnology, automation, information, and circular economy domains. This is rather difficult for existing practitioners. To simplify their jobs, by leveraging recent advances in industrial informatics, this work proposed and developed a low-code development platform for engineering the automation logic of industrial insect rearing and processing. For feasibility demonstration, a pilot facility has been designed, deployed, and benchmarked in this work. When compared with the conventional pro-code practice, the proposed low-code approach can significantly reduce development costs, shorten delivery times, and improve communication efficiency.