Resumen de Cyberphysical Network Applied to Fertigation Agricultural Processes
Higor Vendramini Rosse, João Paulo Coelho
Fertigation is a widely used crop growing method that consists on the precise injection of a nutrient solution that commonly consists on a mixture of three basis components (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) diluted in water. This nutritive suspension is delivered to the plants with a frequency and relative basis contents that depends on the plant’s type, its vegetative state and actual environmental conditions. This production process is becoming increasingly popular due to several advantages over more traditional approaches such as more control on the plant fertilisersand an increasing reduction of irrigation water. This is achieved by an increase complexity on the crop growing process management which requires a technological layer responsible for mixing the nutrients and monitoring the local environmental conditions. Despite this technical component, the short and long term management decisions depend almost exclusively on the grower’s experience and intuition. This type of human-on-the-loop control can lead to a suboptimal use of resources wish can translate into reduction of economic profit and an can lead to waste of water and fertilisers. In this context, decision support mechanisms based on artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms can be of extreme relevance in order to steer the grower decisions and increase the overall production process efficiency. The performance of those types of approaches strongly relies on the availability of data which can be both local and global. This work deals with the architecture of a sensor network which will be responsible to gather local information on the actual growing conditions. Those conditions are usually not homogeneous within the complete production plant and must be taken into consideration. In particular, the current architecture vision will consider those clusters, where the environmental conditions are similar, as cyberphysical devices. These devices will consist on vegetative production area, sensor networks and local control of irrigation state.
