Identification of ruminal degradation curves using metaheuristic approach

Abstract

The use of the modelling process in animal nutrition has found many applications. Therefore, paying attention to all the needs and the nutrient degradability and simultaneously the degradation fraction, the use of artificial intelligence and optimization techniques is inevitable. This study aimed to investigate the use of particle swarm optimization (PSO) to describe the disappearance curves of alfalfa cuts. The first-order kinetics model with a lag phase was evaluated for describing the ruminal disappearance of the dry matter (DM) and crude protein (CP) of alfalfa cuts. The results showed that the model fitted the disappearance data well (r(2) > 0.98), with minor differences in statistical evaluation. Also, reducing the number of iterations increased the merit of this method. To conclude, the utilization of PSO for degradability curves fitting is recommended.