Grain yield data collection and service for heterogeneous platforms

Abstract: Crop yield information is the precondition for the implementation of precision agriculture, and it is the key to organize farmland production and achieve decision-making for agricultural management. Aiming at collecting yield data by the grain yield measurement and control system in harvest field and transmitting the collected data to the yield server in real time, and meanwhile meeting the demands of data access to all kinds of terminals, a data collection and service platform for monitoring grain yield was developed. It is helpful to achieve data real-time interacting among the on-site yield monitoring system, the mobile terminals and the remote yield server. Socket and SOAP (simple object access protocol) technologies are used to implement data exchanging between the remote server and various heterogeneous platforms. A grain yield data collecting system was developed and embedded in the IPC (industrial personal computer) mounted on the combine harvester to collect yield data in real time, and its modules included device setting, data collecting, data parsing and data uploading. The yield data are composed of the information input by user (farm and plot identification, which are input once for each plot), the global position system (GPS) data (longitude, latitude, altitude and time), the data (harvester speed, harvester cutter width, impulse voltage, grain moisture and grain temperature) from the sensors mounted in the harvester and the CAN (controller area network) bus. The collected yield data are packaged every 1 second and transferred to the yield server through Socket via GPRS (general packet radio service), and then they are parsed according to the yield data exchanging protocol and stored into the yield database established in the server. Then the yield data can be calculated, processed and visualized according to various modules embedded in the yield data collection and service system which is developed using Hadoop and Web GIS (web geographic information system) technologies. And the modules include user management, news management, bulletin management, document management, farm management, plot management, yield data management, harvester tracing and Web GIS service, and the grain yield data collecting system is connected with the remote data access terminals through the data collection module and data service module which are embedded in the yield data management. Yield data service is implemented using Web Service based on SOAP for data sharing for various terminals (such as mobile, tablet PC (personal computer), PDA (personal digital assistant), and desktop) with different operating systems (such as Windows, Macintosh, Linux or Android). A grain yield querying system was established for testing the yield data service XML (extensive makeup language) interface provided by the yield data collection and service system, the information including farm, plot and yield could be accessed smoothly, and the yield data visualization could be achieved accordingly. For improving the yield data transmission efficiency, GZIP (GNUzip) is used to compress SOAP messages and reduce bandwidth consumption. In addition, the digital signatures and encryption technology are used to guarantee the security of data transmission via internet. The system experiments were carried out, and the results showed that the grain yield data collecting system worked well on-site and the yield data could be collected and uploaded every 1 minute; the data collection and service system could receive, calculate, process and visualize the real-time yield data efficiently; and the Web Service interface could push the yield data querying results quickly according to client requests. The study indicates that the yield data interaction and sharing between heterogeneous platforms can be achieved by using the yield data collection and service platform proposed in this paper.