Proactive agriculture: An integrated framework for developing distributed hybrid systems

Abstract

In this paper we discuss research work that enables the development of hybrid systems consisting of communicating plants and artefacts and we investigate methods of creating "interfaces" between artefacts and plants in order to enable people to form mixed, interacting communities. Our research objective is to develop hardware and software components that enable a seamless interaction between plants and artefacts in scenarios ranging from domestic plant care to precision agriculture. This paper deals with the approach that we follow for the development of such hybrid systems and discusses both hardware and software architectural aspects, with a special focus on describing the modular platform for wireless sensor network implemented and the distributed context management process followed. The latter imposes a proactive computing model by looping sensor data with actuators through a decision-making layer. The deployment of the system in a precision agriculture application is also presented. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.