Aquaculture is the farming of aquatic organisms in both coastal and inland areas involving interventions in the rearing process to enhance production. It is the fastest growing food industry that now accounts for nearly 50 percent of the world's fish that is used for food.

  1. Global population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050 and as populations increase, so too does the need for food. Aquaculture will be the protein provider for the world.
  2.  2014 saw the aquaculture sector’s contribution to the supply of fish for human consumption overtake that of wild-catch for the first time
  3. Supplying big quantities of fish in an efficient and sustainable way represents a huge challenge. 
  4. Companies need tools and advanced technologies that can help them to optimize production, increase efficiency and at the same time reduce the impact on the environment.
  5. Companies are now keen in an increasing pace to use cloud-based solutions for their software requirements.

Aquaculture is also one of the pillars of the EU's Blue Growth Strategy and its development can contribute to the Europe 2020 Strategy. Although it represents a relatively small part of the EU economy, it has the potential to boost growth and jobs in EU coastal and inland areas.

In recent years aquafarming companies have been competing in low profit margin environment, thus relying on high sales volume to create adequate profits. This landscape leaves little room for inefficient operations, but this is not the only pressure for aquafarming business. Aquaculture, in common with many other sectors, uses natural resources and interacts with the environment, raising challenges of minimizing environmental impact and ensuring environmental sustainability of the production. Efficient production management and the development of best practices respond to the above needs: it can dramatically assist companies, most of which are SMEs, to improve profitability and minimize environmental impacts.

BlueBRIDGE provides an answer to the above needs. It is a cloud-based solution that responds to clear real business requirements, using state of the art data technologies and tools and enabling innovation for the aquaculture business. It provides the means to address the above needs and challenges, that build one upon the other, in a series of VREs that offer:

  • A secure place to store production data and advanced data mining tools to generate production models (growth, feed conversion, mortalities, etc.) based on those data
  • Calculation and visualization of a rich set of production and financial KPIs such as FCR, Mortality rate, IRR, NPV etc
  • What-if analysis tools, that allows the comparative analysis of the impact of various financial, operational and structural factors on the productivity and financial performance of an aquafarm.
  • Models that adjust financial performance in order to account for the environmental, social and economic impact of an aquafarm, supporting policy makers in decision making.
  • A global reference model on aquafarm production, that self-improves while more anonymized production data sets are provided to the system.
  • Spatial planning platform that eases the analysis of geographical areas for meeting particular requirements for aquafarming operations, as seen from the operator, investor, and policy maker standpoints.

Access the BlueBRIDGE VRE here.