Agricultural cyber-physical system enabled for remote management of solar-powered precision irrigation

Recently, several works have been focused on designing and optimising the use of Agricultural Cyber-Physical System (ACPS). Therefore, a variety of ACPSs has been developed for the management of different services in precision agriculture. In this context, we present a new approach to the cyberisation of solar photovoltaic water systems (SPVWS) for remote irrigation management. A typical ACPS architecture design is adopted and extended to support the solar irrigation facility. The distributed architecture is based on the client–server paradigm using Vert.x as a reactive platform, which guarantees a bi-directional communication between the operational level deployed in the greenhouse and the supervisory level hosted in the cloud. The operational level deploys embedded devices which host a set of event-driven components responsible for transmitting external resources data, handling notifications, and executing orders provided at the supervisory level. The cloud incorporates several reactive micro-services performing advanced analyses and data mining in order to support remote control tasks. Within this architecture, users with different roles can remotely monitor and manage the activities of the SPVWS. A successful case study of an experimental greenhouse demonstrated the feasibility of the approach in term of low-cost and good performance in task management.