Farming and Agriculture

Farming and Agriculture

In a nutshell

  • Agriculture is a major consumer of natural resources, using 70% of the world’s freshwater supply. Smart agriculture, which uses AI to improve operational efficiency, could be key in ensuring sufficient nutrition for a projected population of 9.8 billion by 2050.
  • The HYPER-AI project will investigate enabling a smart IoT/edge network to optimise natural resources, fertilisers, tools, and crop management. By deploying new vertical applications across a hyper-distributed computing network, HYPER-AI will also aim to improve latency, real-time response, data security and privacy, and distributed data analytics.
  • The use case will be demonstrated in an automated greenhouse in the municipality of Murcia (Spain). Smart management of the growing environment will demonstrate the global potential of this agriculture application, making it viable to grow crops regardless of outdoor conditions. This could eliminate both the need to import crops, and vulnerability to unpredictable weather as a result of climate change.

Stylised smart farming design on wheat crop image

Challenge

Smart agriculture requires advanced computing solutions to manage and optimise resources efficiently. Existing ICT solutions are based on centralised cloud computing applications, which face challenges of high latency, limited real-time response capabilities, data security and privacy risks, and the aggregation and analytics of distributed data. These limitations hinder the efficiency of critical operations like irrigation, ventilation, and nutrition management, which are essential for sustainable agriculture. Additionally, the diverse hardware and communication technologies used by IoT sensors and edge devices complicate the implementation of a smart agriculture system.

Irrigation in field of green crops with sunshine
Irrigation system inside greenhouse

HYPER-AI Solution

The HYPER-AI platform will aim to address these challenges by improving the effectiveness of the Cloud-Edge-IoT computing continuum, facilitating real-time data processing and decision-making for smart agriculture. In the greenhouse in Murcia, Spain, various IoT sensors and edge gateways monitor environmental conditions and control irrigation, fertigation, ventilation, and drainage systems. HYPER-AI’s distributed approach will target faster AI-based applications, better data-processing and decision-making, and better integration of different hardwares for IoT and Edge devices. By leveraging advanced security measures and ensuring seamless updates and deployments, HYPER-AI will also target data integrity and system adaptability.

Impact

This use case aims to improve precision agriculture by demonstrating the benefits of the HYPER-AI computing continuum in a real-world greenhouse setting. Distributed computing across the Cloud-Edge-IoT network will optimise resource use, enhance productivity, and improve sustainability. The successful implementation in Murcia will serve as a model for global adoption, showcasing how advanced computing can address the challenges of smart agriculture. By improving the efficiency of critical resources like water and energy, HYPER-AI will contribute to a more sustainable and productive agricultural sector, meeting the growing food demands of the future.

Young greenhouse tomatoes

Project KPIs

  • Increase the local data processing and distributed intelligent decisions and real-time operations adapted to the specific hardware capacities of IoT/edge devices.
  • Reduce the development time of AI-based distributed applications and collaborative tasks in edge devices.
  • Provide efficient workload coordination and orchestration of cloud/edge computation.
  • Improve response time and low latency for critical decisions and control operations.
  • Increase the user satisfaction with the distributed intelligence performance and response time.
  • Increase the security and privacy protection using novel by-design IoT protocols.
  • Demonstrate the efficient update of edge devices by virtualising computing and + networking functions.

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