Smart Farming – Open Multi-agent Platform and Eco-System of Smart Services for Precision Farming

The paper is addressing new challenges in agriculture, which are becoming nowadays critical for many countries, including climate changes, exhausted soils, aged farmers, etc. One of the new trends is associated with a step from Agriculture–4.0 focused on automation of physical processes for precision farming – to Agriculture–5.0 based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for digitalization of domain knowledge and automation of farmer decision-making processes. A brief overview of existing IT systems for precision farming is given, key limitations are discussed and business requirements for developing AI solutions are formulated. The concept of digital eco-system of smart services for precision farming is proposed based on AI-technologies. The paper presents functionality and architecture of multi-agent platform and eco-system and identifies vitally important smart services for everyday operations of farmers. The structure and content of ontology-driven knowledge base for precision agriculture is considered, aimed at formalizing specifications of modern types of crops, agro- and bio-technologies, etc. The virtual “round table” is proposed as a generic framework for forming well-balanced recommendations for farmers with the use of ontology-based model of agricultural enterprise, which forms a specification of situation for automatic decision-making. Finally, the first case studies of the industrial prototype of the solution development are discussed.