Thesis subject
Product Line Engineering for Precision Farming
Level: BSc (possibly MSc)
Research area/discipline: Software Engineering
Prerequisites: Software Engineering (INF-32306), Programming in Python (INF-22306)
Short description:
Precision agriculture (PA) or satellite farming is a farming management concept based on observing, measuring and responding to inter and intra-field variability in crops. Crop variability typically has both a spatial and temporal component which makes statistical/computational treatments quite involved. Smart systems incorporate functions of sensing, actuation, and control in order to describe and analyze a situation, and make decisions based on the available data in a predictive or adaptive manner, thereby performing smart actions.
Various different PA systems can be identified each with their own benefits. Very often companies need to develop various PA systems that are in the same product family. Developing these systems from scratch is a time consuming and cumbersome process. Instead a systematic product line engineering (PLE) approach can be adopted that focuses on developing the systems based on reuse of earlier developed asset. Reuse has been a major goal for organizations that build and maintain large-scale and complex systems. The key motivation for reuse is that it promises large gains in productivity, quality and time to market reduction. Nowadays, product lines are rapidly emerging as a viable and important development paradigm allowing companies to realize order-of-magnitude improvements in reuse and time to market and related to this reduction of cost, and improvement of productivity.
In this project a PLE approach will be developed for a PA. The case studies for this will be derived from real projects.
For more information: bedir.tekinerdogan@wur.nl