Nissatech Innovation Centre
Summary
The vision of Agrolytics is to support the development of advanced data analytics services for proactive agriculture micro-environmental monitoring, through intensive experimentation related to the performances of such services.
Due to huge expansion of IoT sensors, micro-environmental monitoring has become a very important trend in the area of smart agriculture. It enables better understanding of the local phenomena and an informed reaction to variations which might be critical for the micro-environment. Especially important is the possibility to use data analytics methods to learn hidden correlations between the (huge number of) parameters that characterise the micro-environment, which generates completely new knowledge that can be used for proactive acting (before an issue happens). One of the main challenges is the need for an efficient real-time processing of measurements in the field in order to understand the current trend and react proactively, if needed (e.g. due to deviations from usual behaviour). This proactivity is usually based on the models of the normal behaviour, which can be learned from existing datasets or directly from streaming data. These requirements imply the need for realizing micro-environmental monitoring with the support of data analytics, incl. real-time (fast) data processing and predictive analytics.
The approach is based on the available sensor data (combined with domain knowledge) being produced from the SmartSantander and Tera4Agri testbeds and made available via the FIESTA-IoT platform. The framework realizes novel data analytics services that combines CEP (complex event processing) and a prediction service, which has proven to be very useful in the case of finding hidden co-relations as described above.
The market we have focused on is precision agriculture where the importance of data analytics is clear and business opportunities for affordable and efficient solutions (as we intend to do) are emerging. We already had contacts with some vineyard owners, being interested in enabling the high-quality grape production through advanced micro-environmental monitoring.