Conceptual Framework of a Prototype Data Driven Decision Support System for Farmland Health Assessment using Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Sustainable growth of agriculture production system is mainly impacted by the soil of farms which if not monitored, assessed and evaluated well; will certainly have adverse effects on the overall growth of plants and yield. With the advent of wireless sensor network (WSN) technology, the problem of continuous monitoring has already been resolved and a good amount of real sensed soil information is also available but this useful information, if not transformed into effective and reliable decisions, it is of no use. To help in meeting the required transformation of “information into effective, reliable and useful decisions”, this paper discusses the conceptual framework of a prototype data-driven decision support system (DSS) for farmland assessment using WSN. The framework integrates real-sensed data, domain knowledge, user experiences, statistical data analysis, rule-based reasoning, and inference mechanism to generate relevant and timely alerts and advisories directly on the end-user mobiles through SMS and mobile app. A prototype DSS has been designed and developed as a proof of concept (POC) and its performance has been evaluated through experimentations using both simulated and real data. The result of experimentations illustrates the potential benefit of the proposed system in routine decision making agronomists and farmers.