Adaptive Agricultural Processes via Open Interfaces and Linked Services
Abstract
Today, users involved in the agricultural production processes increasingly rely on advanced agricultural machines and specialized ICT-enabled decision support tools. The robots and machines integrated within the farming processes host a variety of sensors and measurement devices and are capable of generating large amounts of data that can be analysed to identify the potential for process optimization. For example, the data coming from the milking robot and the feeding robot in a stable could be used to optimize milk production. Additional data coming from other sources could be integrated as well, such as for example information about the food quality or user observations, e.g., regarding the condition of the cows. This is however still not reality because devices of different vendors are not interoperable and data cannot be easily accessed. So today we have a situation that driven by the high business potential of ICT-enabled process optimization, vendors of agricultural machines invest in development of proprietary ICT tools that assist users in process monitoring and control. These ICT-applications typically use well established user interfaces (e.g. smartphone Apps), communication, web and programming standards and leverage existing networking and ICT infrastructures. However due to the lack of relevant standards for agricultural data interfaces, individual solutions are not interoperable. Similarly, the process knowledge is not modelled in a standardized machine readable form and cannot be shared or flexibly used for process-specific machine integration and creation of new processes. The goal of the proposed project agriOpenLink is to develop a novel methodology for dynamic modelling and optimization of farming processes enabled by standardized data interfaces and semantic service technology. Proposed methodology implements dynamic situation detection based on linking data coming from different interoperable sources and flexible process control based on linked semantic services. This methodology shall significantly reduce the time and effort to introduce a new agricultural process involving agricultural machines and users.The results of the project are (1) an open source interface solution to significantly shorten the process of writing an interoperable data acquisition interface for any new device to be integrated within a production process (2) a tool-box for ICT-support of production processes leveraging semantic-services and semantic models (ontologies) for process and data. The project will verify the solutions by implementing an exemplary ICT application in a test environment and will conduct usability study by offering the tools implemented in the project to ICT application developers, and tracking their success in developing ICT-applications in a controlled environment.
Open Interfaces Semantic Technologies adaptive processes standardized Interfaces in agriculture Free Software
Publikationen
Project staff
Andreas Gronauer
Univ.Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Andreas Gronauer
andreas.gronauer@boku.ac.at
Tel: +43 1 47654-93111
BOKU Project Leader
01.06.2013 - 31.05.2016
Wilfried Wöber
Wilfried Wöber MSc.
wilfried.woeber@students.boku.ac.at
Project Staff
01.06.2013 - 31.05.2016
Norbert Barta
Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Norbert Barta
norbert.barta@boku.ac.at
Sub Projectleader
01.06.2013 - 31.05.2016
BOKU partners
External partners
Josephinum Research
none
partner
MKW electronics GmbH
none
partner
The Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (FTW)
none
partner