AgGateway PAIL Project Charter and Budget

Overview

Technology has come a long way in helping growers irrigate their land in smarter ways. Producers can invest in soil mapping, install various types of pumping plants and flow meters, use soil sensors, put a VRI system on center pivots, and even tie some of these together through a few software applications. 
However, none of these tools actually talk effectively or efficiently to each other. The purpose of the PAIL project is to enable this communication by providing a common set of data standards. These standards will represent weather, soil moisture and other relevant data, currently stored in a variety of Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) formats, in an industry-wide format that can be used by irrigation data analysis and prescription programs. Project deliverables will enable more efficient, easier-to-use solutions for growers, and the proposed standards will provide for extensibility for future use cases.

Background

In November 2011, Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (NEEA) brought together a number of irrigation vendors, growers, utilities, and others for a program to reduce energy use associated with agricultural irrigation. The goal is to enable economic enhancement through a 20% improvement in agricultural Irrigation energy efficiency by the year 2020.

The target market includes growing operations of 100+ acres using center pivot irrigation systems. The specific objective of the program is to develop a flexible approach using optimal irrigation techniques and soil mapping, soil moisture, evapotranspiration, weather data and risk management in a common data reporting structure in an integrated irrigation decision support tool. 
Pursuing the above requires a web-based decision support system (Figure 1) that includes the following:

• A data analysis engine to calculate the optimum amount of irrigation for the maximum amount of profit, based on crops, soil conditions, variability, and weather forecasts.
• A simulation program that allows users to enter different scenarios (e.g. variations in crops, soil conditions, weather, market pricing, risk aversion, etc.)
• Application programming interfaces (API) that receive soil moisture and other soil mapping data as well as current and near-future weather conditions
• Common definitions for auditing, analysis, and profitability calculation.
• The ability to send reports and recommended actions to multiple end-user devices (e.g. laptops, smart phones, tablets, etc.)
• The ability to provide updated information to irrigation hardware control points for variable rate irrigation prescriptions (speed and site-specific) as necessary

Figure 1: Overview of Integrated Decision Support System for Ag Irrigation. The focus of the project is on data flowing from the green arrows and to the blue arrows.

The envisioned DSS requires the availability of large quantities of high-quality, easily-accessible data in a standard, well-documented format. This need is consistent with industry customers' demand for increasing ease of access to data and increasingly simple interoperation of systems from different vendors. It is through this confluence of interests that the PAIL project is derived. While the DSS itself is out of scope, standardizing the necessary data formats is. The project participants also believe that the PAIL project will lay the groundwork for new business innovations and opportunities.
Potential participants in this project include irrigation consultants, manufacturers of, and farm system software for, the following equipment:

• Center pivots and other irrigation equipment
• Sprinklers, emitters, and sprayers
• Soil moisture monitoring equipment and systems
• Soil mapping
• In-field weather stations
• In-field eddy covariance systems

In addition, agricultural software and agribusiness analysis companies may want to participate, as analyzing the impact of yield, energy, water, and fertilizer savings is an important component of demonstrating value to growers.
The approach to this project is to, whenever feasible, first research and adopt or adapt existing standards, rather than creating new ones.

Scope

In Scope

Data format describing standardized data elements and definitions for:

1. Irrigation system (not restricted to pivots) setup, configuration, performance specification
   1. Location and geometry of the irrigation system
      1. Opportunity to discuss end gun, corner arm specification
   2. Flows and pressure
2. Irrigation system operation, control, and status
   1. Schedules (how much and when) and Prescriptions (how)
      1. Data representation for establishing a schedule / prescription's scope in space and time
   2. Error reporting, Alerts
   3. As-applied / resource use accounting (non-economic) (To discuss: Privacy)
3. Pumping Plants
   1. Setup & Configuration
   2. Monitoring & Control
4. Data acquisition systems (Observations. Source is on-farm)
   1. Setup & Configuration
   2. General environmental monitoring
   3. Soil monitoring
   4. Atmospheric monitoring
   5. Plant-based monitoring
5. External Data Inputs (Offsite, weather networks, etc.)
   1. Weather Forecast, aggregated weather / climate info, weather networks
   2. Soil (SSURGO and other soil maps, EC maps, holding capacity maps, etc.)
   3. Energy (Look at OpenADR, an existing standard)
   4. DEM
   5. Historical Yield Data (Explore cooperation w SPADE)
   6. Manual Soil Sampling
   7. Crop Performance
      1. Crop coefficients (Format should accommodate communicating these.) (Out of scope unless WG3 is uninterested in taking it up.)
6. Data Outputs
   1. Historical Weather summary
   2. Yield analysis
   3. Water balance (e.g., NRCS IWM reporting)

Out-of-Scope

1. Data exchange below the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) Transport Layer, corresponding to the International Standards Organization (ISO) 7498 standard.
2. Crop simulation details
3. Biotic factor scouting details.
4. Considerations / recommendations about sampling rates.
5. Crop performance: Yield modeling
6. Human-mediated data acquisition (e.g. scouting)
   1. 1. Stand density, quality, growth stages
      2. Abiotic stress factors, such as water and flooding
      3. Biotic stress factors, such as insects and diseases
7. Economics (energy use, energy cost, water costs, revenue forecast (estimated yield & price), estimated costs of other production practices (fertilizers, crop protection).

Project Deliverables

• Use cases
  • Includes description of processes supported by the messages that arise from this project
  • Will serve as a critical tool for determining when the project is complete. The other project deliverables will be examined in the light of the use cases.
• Glossary of terms used in this project (lists and definitions)
  • Incorporation of above terms and definitions into the PAC Glossary.
• Ontology document for representing and uniquely identifying the different variables referenced in the project (e.g., air temperature at 2 m, pressure at the base of the irrigation system, latitude of the pivot center, etc.)
• Schema describing messages for retrieving data from the field and for sending prescriptions to the field.
  • List of messages needed to support the use cases
  • Detailed description of the messages, including cross-referencing with the ontology and glossary of terms
• Results of testing the proposed standard against the use cases.
• Proposed standard(s) submitted to ASABE and/or other standards organizations for discussion / implementation use by the industry

Success Criteria

• Completion of project deliverables
• Standard is adopted by project participants, including at minimum
  • Two that capture/produce field data
  • Two that consume field data
  • Two that consume prescriptions going to the field

Project Management and Administration

1. Project Management Overview

2. Project Phases

This project (PAIL 1) will focus on proposing a standard, testing it against the use cases, and supporting precision irrigation demonstrations with available technologies. A subsequent PAIL 2 project will focus on implementation and emerging issues. 

3. Working Teams

Because of the variety of equipment, and in order to accelerate progress, the project will divide into working groups. These will be determined at the first project launch meeting. The list of "in-scope" areas listed above may help guide the formation of sub-teams for the project. Preliminary ideas include, but are not limited to:

• Use Case Group ("WG11"): This group would begin its operation before the other working groups. It would capture use cases, business processes, and the data needed to perform those processesThis group can be subdivided into Sensor, Irrigation Equipment, and other sub-groups as needed
• Knowledge Representation & Reference Data Group ("WG12"). In charge of assembling:

• Term list, Glossary entries, Ontology, representation / labeling of the data captured by the Use Case Group

• Data Format Group, in charge of: - Designing and documenting the messages- Assembling the schema

Participants are expected to have technical knowledge of how their company currently handles data exchange, as well as to recommend changes that can align with other companies. As such, members should have sufficient knowledge of their company's business model to make recommendations that can be supported by their company.
Time commitments will vary among the participating AgGateway team members. They are expected to vary between 5 and 10 hours a month for a period of 12 months among the various individuals. Time commitments are expected to go down after that period, but specifics will be better estimated at that time.
Since the working groups may meet / operate simultaneously, participating companies are advised to allocate, if possible, more than one person to the project: hopefully at least one person per working group the company is interested in influencing.
Most team meetings will happen via teleconference and team participants will have access to an online collaboration tool (e.g., Confluence). Team members will be expected to travel to the AgGateway Mid-Year Meeting and Fall AgGateway General Member meeting and any other face-to-face meetings that the project board determines are necessary to complete its objectives.

4. Communications Schedule

The following communications will be maintained and distributed on a regular schedule:

5. Issues Management

The Project Manager will maintain an "issues and actions" log for the project. It will be accessible via the collaborative worksite to all appropriate project participants for purposes of information, identifying new issues, and adding comments to issues. Anyone involved with the project can raise an issue, but the Project Manager has a regular responsibility to review issues, assign or elevate issues, and facilitate the resolution of issues.

6. Risk Factors, Constraints, Assumptions & Issues

Risk Factors include failure to meet some of the project deliverables in a timely manner and the withdrawal of team members having critical knowledge.
Constraints include available time of leadership and team members and scheduling conflicts, and agreement on what constitutes appropriate standards for the industry.
Assumptions include that the industry as a whole recognizes industry standards are more effective and efficient than multiple proprietary solutions. 
Issues include understanding and integrating existing international and association standards, and companies' claims that their proprietary data and practices are de factostandards.

7. Estimated Time Commitments

8. Project Budget

9. Project Milestones

More specific milestones will be completed at, or soon after, the launch meeting.

To ensure project completion, the leadership will have a minimum of biweekly teleconferences to review planning and specification documents and other support materials. During the same teleconferences, project leadership will review work progress and agree on release dates and acceptance criteria for the deliverables to the PAC prior to the full demonstration at the Annual AgGateway Conference meeting. Other face-to-face meetings will be scheduled if/when needed. A report will be provided to the AgGateway community at the end of the project and after the demonstration.