Rules engine and complex event processor in the context of internet of things for precision agriculture

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) applications monitor large data flows and events in real time, some raw data is captured from devices located in wireless sensor networks (WSN) and used to make control decisions about actuators. This can be a major problem when the devices grow in number as well as the data that is captured. In this paper, we propose an architecture called “RECEP” for the dynamic processing of events generated in the context of IoT and Precision Agriculture (PA); it is made up of two components: Rules Engine (RE) and Complex Event Processor (CEP). RE allows you to configure dynamic rules conditioning input data from different sources and planning control actions on actuators, alerts, and notifications for end users or applications. The CEP component fuses the input data at the rate at which they arrive, with the rules established in the RE and it performs a prescriptive analysis that consists not only in predicting or detecting patterns of events, but in making automatic decisions. RECEP was implemented in a virtual machine with a 1.9 GHz CPU and 6 GB RAM, then it was integrated into an intelligent irrigation system of an experimental banana plot located in Machala-Ecuador. A WSN simulator was also used to generate sensor data in large quantities, the CEP was evaluated with several test cases, and results show that it consumes computational resources with a growth trend, represented by a logarithmic regression model (r-squared > 0.9); that is, the more events are processed, there is a minimum consumption of resources. It was tested for fifteen days; around 25 thousand events/s were processed. Our RECEP can be implemented in low-cost infrastructure typical of small and large banana producers.