KWS: Digitisation reaches agricultural fields
Talking about agricultural work can lead us to concepts such as tradition, manual production, analogue, etc. However, like all sectors, agriculture is changing and is joining the digital transformation to optimise its processes and achieve better results in its harvests. To solve the problems of manual work, our client created Beetrometer, an innovative system that automatically analyses the quality of harvested beets in an efficient way, carrying out a preliminary preparation and then analysing the samples using a spectrometer.
Plain Concepts has been the developer of a solution capable of bi-directional connectivity, as well as a second stage where all data can be exploited, metrics visualised and anomalies detected in near real time. KWS is one of the world’s leading seed suppliers and offers innovative solutions to farmers in 70 countries. One of its main lines of business is the extraction of sugar from sugar beet, but the manual process was slow, tedious and more costly.
The environments for which Beetrometer is designed include remote rural areas, where it is common to have very limited or no mobile line. In addition, it operates in conditions (wet, muddy, etc.) that had to be supported by any device provided to facilitate connectivity. Therefore, the first challenge we faced was to achieve bi-directional connectivity that would allow us to send different types of quality-related data obtained by Beetrometer to the cloud for further analysis, as well as to receive parameter and configuration files from the cloud.
The process
Despite the complexity of the challenge of solving the connectivity problems, the connection between the industrial PC and GF-Shop has been established, achieving the desired remote access, as well as uploading the data to the cloud for further processing and analysis, avoiding data loss.
From here, a data infrastructure has been created in Azure, which consumes data from the devices through the IoT Hub and with Azure Functions. In addition, a web application has been developed from which user access, metrics, reports, graphs, averages, etc. can be managed.
In addition to this, it has the intelligence to generate new information when there are new developments in the same file thanks to the continuous checking of the data, which also allows the detection of anomalies and the statistical reaction to different pre-configured alarms.
The solution is based on a Big Data management and analytics approach to achieve the best customer outcomes and IoT connectivity.
Development with Azure IoT Hub, Azure Functions.
System for bi-directional connectivity and data management and analysis.
Results
- Scalability to projects all over the world. – Data storage by connecting the machine without installing software. – Automatic deployment of the infrastructure, configuration and
- application with Beetrometer. – Creation of the necessary cloud infrastructure to extract data efficiently. – More attractive visualisation, which processes the data and extracts the relevant information.
We are ready for new challenges
