Cloud-Based Architecture for Farm Management
Mariana Mocanu, Valentin Cristea, Catalin Negru, Florin Pop, Vlad Ciobanu and Ciprian Dobre
Computer Science Department, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania
Email: mariana.mocanu@cs.pub.ro, valentin.cristea@cs.pub.ro, catalin.negru@cs.pub.ro,
florin.pop@cs.pub.ro, vlad.ciobnanu@cs.pub.ro, ciprian.dobre@cs.pub.ro
Abstract—Cloud Computing technologies can fundamentally
contribute to business processes in agriculture, through enhancing
traditional farm management systems, by integrating processes
like, monitoring, operation farm management, with cloud specific
capabilities, which will lead to an increased productivity. Based
on this idea we propose, in this paper, a cloud-based architecture
that helps creating an integrated intelligent system for improving
product quality and business development in the farms field.
Farmers cloud access diverse set of information and data related
to his farm, in an integrated and unified approach in order to
take informed decisions or to be supported in decision taking
process.
Keywords—Cloud Services, Workflow Coordination, Intelligent
Systems, Interoperability, Farm Management System, Data Storage,
Natural Resource Management.
I. I NTRODUCTION
E-services allowed transition from the punctual processes
approach, in agriculture, in which each process was treated
isolated, to the integrated approach, that allows the unified
management of all processes. In this context, the agricultural
greenhouse can be treated as a complex system, in which
soil moisture, a decisive factor in plant growth is correlated
with technical factors (other measured measures, type of
crop, soil type, season, geographical location), with economic
efficiency and the ergonomics of the farmers workplace or the
influences of other adjacent systems and phenomena (climatic,
hydrological, access to expertise, legal regulations, etc.).
The overall objective of the proposed solution in this paper
is to create an intelligent, integrated, cloud services-based
system, using advanced computer technology, automation and
communications to increase product quality and business de-
velopment in the area of farming. The specific objective is to
create an integrated control system for controlling the process
in greenhouse crop production, using the services available on
mobile devices.
The problems that farmers are facing with can be described
as follow: control of environments variables (humidity, temper-
ature, ventilation, etc.), at plot scale, depending on the crop
type; improvement of working conditions for employees due
to the remote control; risk reduction due to centralized and
permanent control; collaborative virtual space for the persons
involved directly or indirectly; supporting various business
categories related with green house growing by using the e-
services available on the created platform.
The integrated tackling of both business perspectives is
sustained from an IT&C point of view by the concept Internet
of Things (IoT) [3]. This concept was first introduced in
1999 but the intensification of the implementation efforts was
possible due to the confluence of a few factors: the increased
performance of the hardware devices, wireless connectivity
having spectacular performances and the possibility to control
a wide range of simple and cheap devices with the aid of
intelligent processes running in Cloud [2] [7]. In Internet of
Things in 2020 A Roadmap for the Future [8], IoT is described
as a “network composed of things/objects which have identi-
ties, virtual personalities which operates in intelligent spaces
and use intelligent interfaces to connect and communicate with
users having various environmental and social contexts”.
The greenhouse is considered a complex system where
physical characteristics such as soil humidity (decisive aspect
in the plant development), the crop’s type, soil type, season,
geographical location, are monitored through Cloud accessible
services, and after the processing of the information, the in
situ elements are controlled. The processing is represented by
Cloud accessible software services which consider economical
efficiency, ergonomic aspects at the farmer’s work place or the
influence that other system or adjacent phenomena could man-
ifest (climatic, hydrological, specific data access, laws, etc).
The classical directions to act, implemented at the moment
both in Romania and internationally aim to give solutions for
the automation of the agricultural activities and services for
the business development in agriculture and related domains.
Cloud became more attractive and easy to use for everyone
and people became more familiar with Cloud environments.
Besides, Cloud computing means resilience, confidentiality,
secure identities, interoperability and safe electronic services
for data and documents. This is an adequate environment for
data storage, aggregation and retrieval, available anytime and
everywhere. If the potential offered by Clouds is exploited
for citizens it will be possible to have Cloud computing
support for an enabled cost-effective interaction with different
services, in our case with farm management systems and with
e-Government services [1].
In present, adding dedicated access to the underlying
infrastructure through a specific APIs offering possibilities to
run application on the Cloud (see Figure 1). That means in
the same way power, control, and efficiency. Clouds are most
often serving developers or businesses, or Large Enterprises
as a new way to host applications. These applications are
usually delivered to client PCs or PC-like smart phones or
other type of devices. In [5] consider the case where the clients
are highly mobile, very interactive, and very functional. There
are explored the resultant needed capabilities of such a cloud,
and concluded that a very rich Cloud Computing platform, far
beyond the capabilities of todays system, would be required to
support such a large collection of mobile and fixed devices [6].
The integration between Cloud Computing and farm man-
agement systems will generate products and services which systems. Are specified limitations such as handling of vast
can be immediately used. Several examples are: numbers of networked devices and complex integration of
different systems and services which are developed by different
• Cloud platform, as a support for services based on the players. As a response to these limitations few research ini-
specific ontology of the agricultural activities and of tiatives were launched, and one important example is “Future
the related ones; Internet” program launched by the European Commission.
• The intelligent system to control the activities in A step further is made by the authors of [10], which
the green house (monitoring and in situ respectively propose a cloud-based farm management system. They propose
remote control); a fundamental change in considering the farm management
• Humidity sensor, based on an original solution; systems which currently are proprietary and monolithic, to
open systems that are Internet-based and cloud hosted which
• E-services package designed for: (i) the configuration will facilitate the collaboration between stakeholders. An im-
of green house plots to allow differentiate handling portant limitation that is imposed by this model is represented
of soil based upon the crop type; (ii) information by the management of personal data or sensitive data about
and instruction of the farmer about the most suitable plant farms and privacy protection.
methods/tools/techniques for growing various crops;
(iii) commercial advertising for providers of specific
equipment and materials (seeds, fertilizers, tools for
green house, etc); (iv) linking with central/local ad-
ministration to realize efficient and fast information
about laws/settlements or other relevant situations for
farmers; (v) interoperability with other e-platforms
for natural resources monitoring (meteorological, hy-
drological, pollution), with the aim of undertaking
alerts/warning messages.
We presented in this section the overall objective, the
problems that farmers are facing with, existing solutions for
farm management systems, a perspective of Cloud Computing,
IoT and SOA that will be used in architecture design and the
integration between Cloud Computing and farm management
systems. The rest of the paper presents the related work and
limitations in Section II and the Cloud-Based Architecture for
Farm Management in Section III. The conclusion and future
development direction are presented in Section IV.

II. R ELATED WORK AND LIMITATIONS

The authors of [14], conclude that production management
and operation must develop in order to keep up with the new
demands of increasing scale. Information technology is the
driving factor along with the development of Internet, cloud
computing, wireless sensor networks and so on. So, we must
use information technology in order to improve the production,
management and operation level in farms.
In [13] the authors argue that, the application of Cloud
Computing and Internet of Things in agriculture moderniza-
tion, will solve the problem of farmers in China. Moreover,
visualization, SOA, RFID, technologies can help in realization
of an plan factory that is completely automatized. However
is hard to achieve a perfect combination of them in order to
obtain fast development of agricultural modernization.
An automatic control of farming operations, based on spa-
tial web services is presented in [12]. The authors developed Fig. 1. ClueFarm: Cloud-Based Architecture for Farm Management
a task controller (TC) prototype with an ISOBUS-compatible
process data messages able to use external web services. Lim-
itations are related to standardization and automation methods III. C LOUD -BASED A RCHITECTURE FOR FARM
for a compliant management. For example in situations where M ANAGEMENT
circumstances change or are dependent on the specific location.
The general architecture of the proposed system consists
The authors of [11] address the shortcomings in the usage of two important parts, strictly delimitated by the physical lo-
of Internet of Things in management and operation of farm cation where they lay (see Figure 1): the cloud farm controller
(CFC) and the local farm controller (LFC). The two controllers
have two separate running modes, isolated and interconnected.
When a farm controller is isolated from the cloud controller, it
will still continue to fulfill its purpose and it will also allow the
user to control it via a local area connection, without the need
of Internet connection. The second running mode starts with
the presumption that the local farm connector is connected to
the Internet, and therefore data to and from the cloud farm
controller is synchronized, thus allowing the user to remote
control the LFC, without any physical restriction, as long as
the user is connected to the Internet.
The design is based on Service-Oriented Architecture
(SOA). SOA facilitates provision of compound services cov-
ering whole customer processes, where a customer may be
either a citizen or an enterprise. Compound services encom-
pass: integrated services composed of e-services provided by
different administrative units; mix services composed of e-
services provided by both administrative and business units;
value-added services e-business services built on top of exiting
cloud-based architecture [4].

A. Local Farm Controller (LFC)

Being located in the farm premises, the local farm con-
troller provides at-site data collection and control. As shown
in Figure 2, the local farm controller consists of three major
subsystems: data storage systems, external connectors and as
main core, the farm workflow process manager. The main
responsibility of the LFC is to execute the preconfigured farm
workflows and to provide access to live and historical data.
Fig. 2. The Local Farm Controller (LFC)
B. Cloud Farm Controller (CFC)
The Cloud Farm Controller (see Figure 3) plays the role of
a central authority that allows data aggregation between farms,
farm control from the Internet, integration with other external
services (maps, weather, etc.).

C. Architecture Components
Data Storage Services. Stored in a relational database, the
available data is:
• Sensor data (temperature, humidity, etc.)
• Workflow information data (results, status, etc.)
• Command history data (commands sent to the actua-
tors, etc.)
Cloud Data Connector and Cloud Sync Service. The main
role of the Cloud Data Connector is to provide means to
make local farm data available for synchronization with the
Cloud Farm Controller via the Cloud Sync Service. The Cloud
Sync Service assures data security by using encrypted ways of
communication (https) and authentication.
Fig. 3. The Cloud Farm Controller
Farm Workflow Process Manager. The Farm Workflow
Process Manager is the main core the LFC and allows pre-
configured workflows to be executed, via services.
The Local Mobile App Connector allows the user to
Local Website Connector. The local website allows the connect to the system by using the WLAN located in the
user to configure and control the LFC. Local Mobile App farm by using the mobile application by sharing the following
Connector. information and control messages:
Fig. 4. Production Management Application
• Displays the farm status information: temperature,
humidity, etc;
• Displays workflow information: current step, future
actions, etc;
• Alerts the user via notifications;
• Allows manual actions to be run: open window, start
the irrigation system, etc.
Data Collection External Connector and Commands Ex-
ternal Connector. These modules allow data retrieval from
the PLC and commands being sent to the PLC via the serial
protocol.
Configuration Service A configuration service is used to
define the workflows, users and other miscellaneous cus-
tomizations.
Notification Service All notifications that are forwarded to
the user are controlled by the notification service.
Execution Service. This service is used for actions that can
be executed automatically (e.g. open the windows, start the
ventilation system, initiate a firmware update, etc.). For those
actions that cannot or the farmer wishes not to be executed
automatically, the Notification Service is responsible to inform
the farmer with the appropriate information.
Coordination Service has the following functions:
• Cloud Data Connector and Cloud Sync Service and
handle simple situations (e.g., temperature increase
inside a greenhouse) having the capability to automat-
ically send different action to Execution Service.
• Coordinates the decisions reached by services the
farmer is currently using;
• Responsible for conflict resolution among external or
internal services;
• Triggers the Execution service and the Notification
Service;
• It is configurable from the Configuration Service or
directly from external entities (e.g., farmers, equip-
ment manufacturers) since it allows them to install
knowledge in the form of pre-defined rules.
Developer API. The developer API allows other program-
mers to implement new applications that interact with the
CLUeFARM system.
Service Managements and Connectors offer the possibility
to interact and integrate with different external services, like:
Weather Service, Geo-Spatial Services, Advisory Services,
Advertisement, Social Networking, e-Banking and e-Payment,
etc. We consider here: XML Service Workflow, Collaborative
Service Workflow and SOAP / REST connectors.
D. Business Level
On the top of Cloud-based architecture presented in pre-
vious section, different applications can be developed, like:
Farm Analytics, Real Time Recommendation, Social Network
Analysis, Opinion Making External Collaboration with other
Farms, Production Management Applications, Farm History,
etc. The application layer can be viewed as business layer
level because at this level a farmer needs to monitor the crop
and machinery, and in case there are some out of the ordinary
events, there is a need to come up with a correction plan and
implement appropriate actions.
The workflow of Production Management Application is
presented in Figure 4. All components that describe the appli-
cation flow are interconnected with Cloud Farm Controller. As
we presented in the previous section, the interconnection can
be done directly with Local Farm Controller. The Production
Management Application consists in 3 main components (Pro-
duction Monitoring, Production Plan Action and Implement
Action) and 2 Alerts modules (Production Alerts and Failure
Alerts). The execution of this type of workflow can be executed
under a hybrid algorithm for workflow scheduling in Cloud-
Based cyberinfrastructures, solution proposed in [9].
 IV. E XPERIMENTAL A NALYSIS
To conduct our experiments, we zipped different chunk
of data receive from a temperature sensor from 1KK up to
128MB then uploaded it to and downloaded it from Google
Drive, SkyDrive, Amazon S3, Dropbox and a private HDFS.
We performed each set of uploads and downloads 8 times and
took the average, conducting our testing over the course of five
business days (this aspect is not important for HDFS cluster).
Each test was performed using the latest version of the
Safari browser with a medium speed Ethernet connection to
a national ISP, which typically averages 57.2 Mbps down and
14.8 Mbps up on Speedtest.net.
Fig. 5. Average Upload/Download Speed (MB/s) for different Cloud Storage
Providers.
Figure 5 presents the average upload/download speed
(MB/s) for different Cloud storage providers. HDFS has a
higher speed (both up and down) because it is installed on
a local cluster. Amazon S3 and Google Drive have similar
performance, and SkyDrive and Dropbox offer different per-
formance for up and down speed.
Fig. 6. Total transfer time for performed experiments for different Cloud
Storage Providers.
Figure 6 present the total task time, which means total
transfer time for performed experiments. We present this
results in ascending order. This results confirm again that a
local HDFS cluster has better global performance. On the other
hand, the total overhead is 25%, which can be acceptable for
low speed process, like processed performed in a farm or in a
greenhouse.
Fig. 7. Average Upload/Download Time (s) for different filesize (KB) for
HDFS.
Figure 7 shows the comparison between the uploading and
downloading speed for files of different sizes, where we can
observe that copying files from local to HDFS is much faster
than vice-versa.
Fig. 8. Average putObject/getObject Time (s) for different filesize (KB) for
Amazon S3.
The graph in Figure 8 illustrates a comparison between the
transfer time (measured in seconds) obtained by each program
running on client data set generated for Amazon S3. Based on
the obtained results it can be seen that during read operations
is significantly lower than that of writing as the size of the
transferred object increases.
Figure 9 presents average upload/download time (s) for
different filesize (KB) for Google Drive. It can be seen that
after 512 KB, the upload time grows proportional to the
size. There seem to be little deviations from this rule. The
downloading speed grows slowly for files us to 1024KB and
after that it approximately doubles for each file increase. It can
be observed that upload speeds are approximately five times
slower that download speeds. The medium speed connection
we have tested the the pro- gram is rated at 20 mbps and
the speed have improved. The times are even less than double
because this connection seems to be more reliable and achieves
higher speeds when connecting to Google Servers. On this
connection download speeds are also faster than upload speeds
although they are similar to the times obtained when manually
uploading to Drive. Uploading is approximately three times
slower than downloading.

Fig. 9. Average Upload/Download Time (s) for different filesize (KB) for
Google Drive.
Figure 10 presents average upload/download Time (s) for
different filesize (KB) for SkyDrive. For larger files, there
is much lower speeds, both for download, but especially for
upload. Values less than 8KB may be excluded from the
results, which were inconclusive.
Fig. 10. Average Upload/Download Time (s) for different filesize (KB) for
SkyDrive.
V. C ONCLUSION
We presented in this paper a solution for Cloud-Based
Architecture for Farm Management. The architecture has two
components: LFC (Local Farm Controller) and CFC (Cloud
Farm Controller). In this the management of farms can be done
directly being connected to LFC or from any remote location
through CFC. This solution increases the quality of agricultural
products grown in greenhouses by combining several advanced
cloud services used on the entire value creation chain. The
primary chain services provide real-time measurement of spe-
cific parameters (humidity, temperature, soil composition) and
direct drive of watering equipment, depending on the specific
culture of each lot.
The future work will be oriented on experimental model
of the integrated system, which includes the cloud platform
hosting the services, the system of sensors (the method of
measuring the soil moisture is intended to be patented) and
the driving system of the watering equipment. The platform
allows the connection of any type of automation device al-
ready installed in the greenhouse, by appropriate web service
connector. If the farmer does not have such facilities, he will
have to purchase only sensors that will be positioned in the
appropriate places and actuators for watering and for accessing
the services he will subscribe to the web service, which in turn
will provide information in the desired format and will drive
the watering equipment.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The research presented in this paper is supported by project
clueFarm: Information system based on cloud services acces-
sible through mobile devices, to increase product quality and
business development farms - PN-II-PT-PCCA-2013-4-0870.
We would like to thank the reviewers for their time and
expertise, constructive comments and valuable insight.
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