Abstract
One of the key elements of precision agriculture is the farm management information system (FMIS) that is responsible for data management, analytics and subsequent decision support. Various FMISs have been developed to support the management of farm businesses. A key artefact in the development of FMISs is the software architecture that defines the gross level structure of the system. The software architecture is important for understanding the system, analysing the design decisions and guiding the further development of the system based on the architecture. To assist in the design of the FMIS architecture, several reference architectures have been provided in the literature. Unfortunately, in practice, it is less trivial to derive the application architecture from these reference architectures. Two underlying reasons for this were identified. First of all, it appears that the proposed reference architectures do not specifically focus on FMIS but have a rather broad scope of the agricultural domain in general. Secondly, the proposed reference architectures do not seem to have followed the proper architecture documentation guidelines as defined in the software architecture community, lack precision, and thus impeding the design of the required application architectures. Presented in this article is a novel reference architecture that is dedicated to the specific FMIS domain, and which is documented using the software architecture documentation guidelines. In addition, the systematic approach for deriving application architectures from the proposed reference architecture is provided. To illustrate the approach, the results of multi-case study research are shown in which the presented reference architecture is used for deriving different FMIS application architectures.
Highlights
The continuous developments in information technology (IT) over the last decades have a substantial and increasing impact on various industrial domains
The reference architecture (RA) presented in this study uses a different approach than other RAs for farm management information system (FMIS)
The main objective was to present a new RA for FMIS based on the well-established software architecture design practices following the current software architecture standard (ISO/ IEC/IEEE 42010 2011)
Summary
The continuous developments in information technology (IT) over the last decades have a substantial and increasing impact on various industrial domains. Can be applied more precisely (Köksal and Tekinerdogan 2019) In this context, farm management information systems (FMISs) are being developed to manage the large amount of information that is involved in these processes, and likewise to keep track of and support the farm activities. Many different FMISs have been proposed that can be used to support farm management activities (Fountas et al 2015a; Capterra 2020; Köksal and Tekinerdogan 2019). Where the MIS can support decision making by providing timely information about the planning, control and operational functions of an organization (Waston et al 1991), the FMIS does the same for the agricultural domain. The primary goal of FMISs is to reduce the production costs, maintain high quality and to comply with agricultural standards (Fountas et al 2015a)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
