Received Date:2026-01-29 Accepted Date:2026-04-01
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2026 NO.02
The valorization of organic solid waste (OSW) has become a crucial direction for global environmental governance and energy structure optimization, as it addresses both waste pollution and energy shortage challenges. Anaerobic digestion (AD) is a core biotechnological process that converts organic matter in OSW into methane-rich biogas, thereby achieving the dual objectives of energy recovery and waste volume reduction. However, practical AD systems often suffer from insufficient stability, over-reliance on empirical parameter tuning, and poor adaptability to fluctuating operational conditions, which significantly hinder their large-scale implementation and efficiency. Artificial intelligence (AI), owing to its superior capabilities in nonlinear modeling, time-series forecasting, and multi-variable optimization, offers a promising technical pathway to overcome these challenges. AI can support various aspects of the AD process, including process modeling, operational parameter optimization, fault detection and warning sytems, pretreatment strategy enhancement, and microbial community regulation, by offering high prediction accuracy and rapid response. This review systematically summarizes cutting-edge AI applications in AD, focusing on advancements in deep learning, automated machine learning (AutoML), and reinforcement learning, and thoroughly analyzes the feasibility and value of deep integration between AI and AD technologies. Considering the significant compositional heterogeneity of various OSW types (e.g., food waste, sewage sludge, and livestock manure), these substrates display substantial variations in biodegradability and methane potential, leading to fluctuating kinetic behavior in AD systems. To address this, AI models have demonstrated improved generalization through rigorous feature selection and have been widely applied across critical stages of the AD process. Recent studies indicate that ensemble learning models such as Random Forest and XGBoost can achieve coefficients of determination (