ASABE Technical Library - Abstract

Abstract. The past decade has seen a tremendous increase in the number of agricultural machines whose internal data communications follow the ISO 11783 (ISOBUS) standard. In many cases, the ISOBUS data never leaves the vehicle because the exporting process is commonly a painstakingly manual task with little reward. However, advancements in digital agriculture have escalated the value of data and created a demand for an easy and efficient way of acquiring ISOBUS messages. Recent experiments to collect ISOBUS messages for observing and producing data analytics were made (Marx, et al., 2015; Pitla, Luck, Werner, Lin, & Shearer, 2016). With the emerging demand for high quality farming data, a systematic way of collecting, processing and distributing ISOBUS data is needed.

With this goal in mind, this paper presents a reference design using the Kappa Architecture (Kreps, 2014) that is scalable and highly distributed. The design starts with CANdroid, a recent redevelopment of ISOBlue (Layton, et al., 2014) on a commercially-available Android platform, which collects the ISOBUS data and uploads them to the Cloud. Within the Cloud, data is firstly organized into a stream and further processed in the Apache Kafka (Apache Kafka, 2016) database. The Kafka database then feeds the processed data to a server implemented using Open Ag Data Alliance (OADA) API. Finally, a high-level web application, TrialsTracker, pulls the data from the OADA API server and visualizes the data with a map which completes the reference design.

The first part of the paper gives an overview of ISOBUS and states the objectives. The second and third part of the paper present the making of CANdroid as well as how the Apache Kafka database and the OADA API server works. An example usage of TrialsTracker is also explained in the third part of the paper.