ICT-AGRI Meta Knowledge Base

Integration of Farm Management Software and Data Aggregators - Sensors
We are looking for sensor and data aggregator companies what will provide different kinds of farm data such as soil sensors, airborne pictures, satellite images or similar. By employing hyperloacl weather data in our servers we would like to devise a easy to use interface which can accept different data structures to be used in nowcasts and forecast in food production. We are specially interested in wheat, barley and maize initially. Please contact us if your experienced in hardware solutions. Best Kerem

Service Oriented Agri-Cloud Platform for NB-IoT Evolution in Smart Agriculture: AGRI4.0
Internet of Things (IoT) is a popular term used for interconnection of sensors, actuators, machines and the interfaces via Internet protocols and the relevant networking infrastructure. Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT) will probably be the most important milestone for IoT applications in many areas within the next five years. Its high electromagnetic penetration capability (-144dB sensitivity) and ultra low power energy consumption brings NB-IoT as very strategic tool for smart agriculture based on cloud based services for monitoring, automation and management process. Expected feasibility range will be a new road map for a large variety of field requirements from animal ear tags to irrigation control systems in agriculture. It is promising both for long battery life up to 10 years and longer range communication up to 10 times through existing GSM systems with relatively low cost terminal nodes. These new and low cost mobile communication devices and their penetration rate at rural area requires harmonized interconnection between different observation, automation and management systems. Agricultural field devices and the equipment still does not have standard interfaces or protocols. Agri 4.0 project intends establishment of a service oriented agricultural cloud platform for, a) Standardization of interconnection of different kinds of sensors, actuators and the equipment in agriculture through web services, b) Service level optimization of cloud based management of field processes in Agriculture, c) Development of pilot real time mobile applications for initiation of NB-IoT services We’re entering a new period for agricultural commodities that overall efficiency management will probably be the main driving argument through systems integration between production planning and the consumption of the individuals. Arable land per capita has fallen down almost 40% since 1970 due to dramatic change in raise of world population after industrial revolution. This trend requires minimum 3 times more food within next 40 years for a peaceful world. In order to balance agricultural production in the past 40 years, fertilizer use for plant growth and chemical use for plant protection have already been increased up to limitations of human health related regulations. Basin based water resource balance is negative even in most of semiarid regions including Mediterranean countries. On the other hand, new availabilities of information and communication technologies (ICT) also arises as a probable solution candidate at least to save food balance for the next 40 years. Precision farming together with vertical integration of agricultural production and management process over cloud based technologies are now becoming more applicable then ever due to standardization of systems and better cost efficiency. A critical key point in feasibility and applicability of new components of ICT technologies for agricultural information systems is quality of service (QoS) management for reliability and redundancy. From QoS point of view, one of the problematic issue was telemetry of sensors and field communications of operational equipment mainly due to energy restrictions, non-standard interconnection and the reliability management at the bottom layer of the integration. New GSM based Internet of Things (IoT) oriented communication standards are critical for completing the technological constellation for rapid spread of integrated agricultural information services. This trend of common agricultural service platforms may open a way for efficient use of resources by bringing observation, computation, information and management systems as a part of one harmonized system. This possible vertical integration way in agricultural production can be seen as 4th generation (AGRI4.0) in 10.000 years experience of agricultural production by the man kind, after use of hand held tools, machinery and automation systems. Large group of users including farmers, traders, logistic operators, banks, insurance companies, consultants, suppliers and governmental institutions besides the sensors and the machinery, can access their own or common applications and the data depending on profile coupled service availabilities. Why and how bringing the technical components as distributed sensor data acquisition via Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT), spatio-temporal data fusion based on high performance computers (HPCs), integration and harmonization of management processes based on service oriented architecture (SOA) can increase over all food production efficiency from farm to fork will be presented and discussed. TARBİL system is the most comprehensive agricultural observation network by having more than 17.000 nodes. It is planned to be used in optimization of Agri 4.0 service platform. Hence, for example irrigation control via IoT devices over platform based services will be minimum 20% more effective with respect conventional systems.