Efficient use and management of conventional and non-conventional water resources through smart technologies applied to improve the quality and safety of Mediterranean agriculture in semi-arid areas
The objective of WATERMED 4.0 is to develop and to apply an integrated decision support system based on the Internet of Things, for managing the whole water cycle in agriculture, monitoring water resources (conventional and non -conventional) and water demands including the measure of economic, energy, social and governance factors that influence the water use efficiency in Mediterranean agricultural production areas.
To study, adapt and implement technologies for reclaimed water and re-use, already validated in past EU projects by the partners, that will increase water quality and quantity, for knowledge transfer, further development and validation in other environments of the Mediterranean.
The proposed solution takes advantage of Internet of Things and Services technologies and standards, to leverage the integration and software/hardware developments of monitoring and control systems for the new advanced water systems.
To improve agricultural productivity in Mediterranean agrosystems (water scarcity, low quality water, etc.) by minimizing the use of water and fertilizers by optimizing the management of fertigation. For this purpose, the consortiums and the experience gained in the last projects and the new information technologies applied to different spatio-temporal scales (edaphic-climatic, agronomic, land mapping, ...) based on real-time in situ will be used and applied. soil moisture, thermo photos, multispectra photo, remote sensing, etc.
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To analyse the potential of agrophotovoltaic applications (APV) with respect to a reduction of irrigation needs through shadowing, PV-based water treatment of low quality water (LQW) to avoid or mitigate soil salinization. As a further research area we analyze how water pumps, sensors, water treatment or other electrical devices of the water system can use the electricity produced by the PV layer. This is a particular advantage in isolated rural areas, that will be able to produce self-consumption electricity, integrated in the irrigation system.
To analyse the potential of agrophotovoltaic applications (APV) with respect to a reduction of irrigation needs through shadowing, PV-based water treatment of low quality water (LQW) to avoid or mitigate soil salinization. As a further research area we analyze how water pumps, sensors, water treatment or other electrical devices of the water system can use the electricity produced by the PV layer. This is a particular advantage in isolated rural areas, that will be able to produce self-consumption electricity, integrated in the irrigation system.
The social and economic studies will engage end-users and other key social, economic and policy stakeholders, participating actively in the research and in training and educational activities of this proposal (WP7), ensuring that research responds to society’s needs.
The WATERMED layered architecture considers several types of services to ensure its replication and adaptability to different crops and locations, dealing with IoT services, virtual entities and storage services, and data analytics and machine learning, respectively.
The fundamental idea is to enable optimizations of irrigation, water distribution, and consumption based on a holistic analysis that collects information from all aspects of the system including even the natural water cycle and the cumulated knowledge related to growing particular plants.It results in savings to all parties as it guarantees the availability of water in situations where water supply is limited and also prevents over- and under-irrigation.
We identify three broad phases in a water management system for agriculture:
Water reserves coming from different sources such as rivers, lakes, dams, and aquifers, which follow the natural water cycle.
Water is transported from W1 to the final usage place (W3) through a network of canals, pipes, pumps, valves, and gates. Water distribution may assume different configurations depending on the region or country. In some places, water resources are carefully used and controlled by a central authority.
In agriculture, one of the critical uses of water is irrigation, which can be performed by different techniques.
A variety of sensor and actuator technologies to acquire data. Two general types of sensors collect data for the WATERMED system: a) stationary sensors (soil sensors, weather, etc.) and; b) satellite images using the support of COPERNICO service in Europe.
IoT Service descriptions are annotated with contextual metadata to create Virtual Entity (VE) representations of physical entities.
Provides different components for context-aware management supported by cloud-based big data analytics techniques.
Builds application related middleware management services on top of the generic data processing services provided by Layer 3.
Water and nutrients Application Services: A multitude of data that is sensed, acquired, stored, and processed is transformed into services that make sense to farmers.
The overall approach of this project is increasing the efficiency in the management of conventional and non-conventional water resources applied to agriculture from an integral perspective. The new perspective comes from the assumption that technology development, societal engagement, governance and transferring knowledge will be enhanced by the new possibilities of digitalisation and cyber-computing through an open platform, in a form that best fits the needs of end-users and the associated supply chain, from high waters (water management authorities, water planning organisations, wastewater treatment plants, technology SME’s) to the plot (irrigation communities, farmers and technology SME’s).
The expected impacts will be easily monitored all along the water cycle for agriculture, real-time controlled by the Internet of Things and Services, helping to increase quantity and quality of water available for agriculture and to save water and nutrients.
The project will contribute to the call expected impact in the following way:
Increasing the quantity, quality and safety of non-conventional water use for agriculture and food processing (direct use and indirect use of reclaimed water)
Increasing the efficiency of water management systems with particular regard to energy and water smart infrastructures.
WATERMED 4.0 KICK-OFF MEETING (Murcia, Spain)
All partners meet in Murcia to officially launch the project, share a common project vision and define next action points.
WATERMED 4.0 MEETING (Khemis Miliana, Algeria)
Organisation Lead : UDBKM, UMU, UDBKM
WATERMED 4.0 virtual meeting
Coordination and monitoring meeting, with all project partners, to detail the status of actions and work packages and define next steps.
Organisation: UMU
2nd Virtual Meeting of WATERMED 4.0
Coordination and monitoring meeting, with all the partners, to detail the status of the actions and work packages and to define the following steps.
Organisation: UMU
Area of Júcar – Vinalopó district (Alicante province)
Table grapes, almond, tomato
Crop in open field: table grapes, cherries and almonds
UNDBKM Pilot Farm; individual farmers at Ain DeflaKhemisMiliana
Potato, strawberry, tomato, apple
In all experiment a factorial randomized block design will be used. One factor will be the water source (good water, and saline water) combined with two fertigation management (local management and DSS management)
Karapınar
Sugar beet, cherry tree
In all experiment a factorial randomized block design will be used. One factor will be the water source (good water, and treated waste water) combined with two fertigation management (local management and DSS management)
The next 24th of November, in the Salón de Actos of the Faculty of Informatics (University of Murcia), will be the Conference "Intelligent Digitalisation of Agriculture in the Mediterranean" in which the results of the projects PRECIMED, WATERMED4.0 and BERRIES4.0 will be presented.
The aim of this conference is to present the results of three leading projects in the digitisation of the agricultural sector, with special emphasis on solutions in the Mediterranean Arc. In this sense, the advances identified in precision agriculture, efficient crop management, smart greenhouses and water governance will be presented, as well as their application in different cases of use.
In addition, the conference will also include the participation of the director of the PRIMA Foundation, and there will be a final panel on digitisation in the field of agriculture by different agents and entities of the Region of Murcia.
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Last Thursday 7th December 2021, Prof. Antonio Skarmeta from the University of Murcia participated as a panelist at the 4th Mediterranean Water Forum, held at the Notch Conference Center in Malta. He talked about the WATERMED 4.0 project in the session called “The Mediterranean as a hub of water management solutions and responses: Towards optimized management of water and sanitation services”. The aim of the Forum was to present the Mediterranean as a hub of innovative water management responses which have been locally developed or adapted to address the prevailing challenges of the region including those related to climate change impacts. It also outlined how the Mediterranean region is developing an integrated implementation framework through the Union for the Mediterranean’s Water Agenda (Malta, 2017), while also servicing other important political and technical regional and sub-regional frameworks, which ensures that different water management actions reinforce each other thereby providing a comprehensive response for evolving needs. In doing so, the forum also showcased the replication potential of these responses to address emerging problems at a global scale, including as a contributor to jobs, prosperity, stability and peace. During the session, Prof. Antonio Skarmeta explained the general objectives and activities that are being carried out and expected results of the project and, in turn, highlighted how the solutions proposed in WATERMED 4.0 are fully replicable and useful to improve efficiency in the management of natural resources and marine protected areas. More than 300 people from the scientific field, the third sector and the public administration attended the conference and showed great interest in the technological tools proposed by WATERMED4.0.
Author(s): Abdelmadjid Saad, Abou El Hassan Benyamina, Abdoulaye Gamatié
Publication date: February 19, 2020
Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2974977
Abstract: Water plays a crucial role in the agricultural field for food production and raising livestock.Given the current trends in world population growth, the urgent food demand that must be answered byagriculture highly depends on our ability to efficiently exploit the available water resources. Among criticalissues, there is water management. Recently, innovative technologies have improved water management andmonitoring in agriculture. Internet of Things, Wireless Sensor Networks and Cloud Computing, have beenused in diverse contexts in agriculture. By focusing on the water management challenge in general, existingapproaches are aiming at optimizing water usage, and improving the quality and quantity of agriculturalcrops, while minimizing the need for direct human intervention. This is achieved by smoothing the watermonitoring process, by applying the right automation level, and allowing farmers getting connected anywhereand anytime to their farms. There are plenty of challenges in agriculture involving water: water pollutionmonitoring, water reuse, monitoring water pipeline distribution network for irrigation, drinking water forlivestock, etc. Several studies have been devoted to these questions in the recent decade. Therefore, this paperpresents a survey on recent works dealing with water management and monitoring in agriculture, supportedby advanced technologies. It also discusses some open challenges based on which relevant research directionscan be drawn in the future, regarding the use of modern smart concepts and tools for water management andmonitoring in the agriculture domain.
Author(s): Jose Vicente Yago Martnez, Antonio F. Skarmeta, Miguel A. Zamora-Izquierdo, Alfonso P. Ramallo-Gonzlez
Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
DOI: 10.1109/EDiS49545.2020.9296443
Abstract: Precision Agriculture (PA), as the integration of information, communication and control technologies in agri-culture, is growing day by day. The Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing paradigms offer advances to enhance PA connectivity but typical IoT measurements are not the only data sources available for crop management systems. The great development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provides a powerful tool for analyze the crop status in a near real time extent, concretely the images from Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite have revolutionized PA. Also, there is a lot of unstructured agricultural data disseminated on websites that can be very useful if collected systematically trough web scraping techniques. In this article we present a real-life example of such heterogenous data to serve as complement for a cutting-edge smart farming platform. Specifically, the calculation of the Crop Evapotranspiration has been projected as a case study.
Author(s): Sami Touil, Amina Richa, Meriem Fizir, Brendon Bingwa
Publication date: March 26, 2021
Publisher: Reviews in Environmental Science and Bio/Technology
DOI: 10.1007/s11157-021-09572-2
Abstract: Agrivoltaics (APV) combine crops with solar photovoltaics (PV) on the same land area to provide sustainability benefits across land, energy and water systems (Parkinson and Hunt in Environ Sci Technol Lett 7:525–531, 2020). This innovative system is among the most developing techniques in agriculture that attract significant researches attention in the past ten years. The objective of this mini review is to present and summarize the recent studies on the effect of PV shading on crop cultivation (open field system and greenhouses integrated PV panels), with the aim to identify a correlation between the growth indicators, crop quality (antioxidant activity, sugar content, etc.) and the characteristics of PV installation (shading degree). The alteration of microclimate parameters such as solar radiation, air temperature, humidity and soil temperature under the PV panels was highlighted. Moreover, impact of APV shading on irrigation and water saving and economic feasibility of APV was further discussed. Our main findings are that (1) the reduction in solar radiation is the main changed factor underneath the APV canopy where a reduction of more than 40% the solar radiation due to the presence of the PV panels was observed. (2) Agri-voltaic systems (PV greenhouse or ground) with cover ratio equal or lower than 25% did not show significant effects on plant growth and quality. (3) Inhibitory effects on crops growth was observed with coverage ratio of 50 to 100% except for strawberry and spinach. (4) Water use efficiency for some crops species in dry land climate was greater in the APV system. Given the findings, the research seems promising enough to support APV practices that limit PV panel shading to be lower than 25% to avoid affecting crop growth, assumed to be the priority of an agricultural operation.
Author(s): Amina Richa, Meriem Fizir, Sami Touil
Publication date: April 12, 2021
Publisher: Environmental Chemistry Letters
DOI: 10.1007/s10311-021-01233-8
Abstract: Hydroponic cultivation is a promising alternative that could address environmental and food issues. Hydroponic cultivation allows farmers to reduce the amount of fertilizers and water. Moreover, accurate monitoring of nutrient levels allows to optimize crop growth. For that, researchers have designed ion-selective electrodes as sensors and the internet of things for precise monitoring. Here we review the application of ion-selective electrodes in monitoring hydroponic solutions with focus on parameters, sensitivity, accuracy and the internet of things. We found that the targeted concentrations of nitrate and potassium are successfully maintained with errors of less than 10 mg L−1 by using polyvinyl chloride membrane based on ion-selective electrodes. Calcium electrodes show less sensitivity in detection of calcium ions in hydroponic solutions. Regular calibration sequence solved the stability issue of ion-selective electrodes. Compared to carbon nanotube-based ion-selective electrodes, the best results for sensing nitrates were obtained with polyvinyl chloride ion-selective membranes.
Author(s): Amina Richa, Sami Touil, Meriem Fizir, Vicente Martinez
Publication date: October 21, 2020
Publisher: Reviews in Environmental Science and Bio/Technology
DOI: 10.1007/s11157-020-09555-9
Abstract: Rapid development of hydroponic farming which is soilless cultivation method of growing plant using mineral nutrient solution dissolved in water produces large amount of wastewater rich in nutrients and organic matters thus imposes great harms to human and environment, if the waste nutrient solution is not correctly treated. The objective of this review is to present information concerning hydroponic systems, including: the different classes and methods of operation; advantages and drawbacks and the recent approaches and development in hydroponic wastewater treatments. Particular emphasis has been placed on removal of root exudates from reused waste nutrient solution in closed system. The reviewed technologies for nutrient removal or recovery include denitrification, microalgae cultivation, constructed wetlands and activated carbon methods. The alternatives byproducts i.e. biogas as agriculture fertilizer for hydroponic cultivation to attain sustainable agriculture was further highlighted. In addition, current challenges and future prospects in this field are carried out. About 119 published studies are reviewed in this paper. It is evident from the literature survey articles that activated carbon is the most frequently studied for the nutrient recovery of hydroponic wastewater.
Author(s): Meriem Fizir, Richa Amina, Hua He, Sami Touil, MoussaBrada, Leila Fizir
Publication date: May 20, 2020
Publisher: Reviews in Environmental Science and Bio/Technology
DOI: 10.1007/s11157-020-09537-x
Abstract: Halloysite nanotubes (HNTs) are of importance for the elimination of various kinds of molecules from complex matrix due to their outstanding characteristic such as the lumen porosity, non toxic, and large available quantities. Molecular imprinting has been considered as a promising approach which allows the creation of selective binding site. Modifying HNTs with imprinted polymer layer which result in so-called HNTs@MIPs improves in term of selectivity and adsorption capacity without affecting the aforementioned proprieties. These nanomaterials offer a remedy to the flaws of traditional MIPs, such as poor site accessibility for templates, slow mass transfer and template leakage. The fecal point of this mini review will be on the recent advances in the synthesis of HNT@MIPs, and their environmental and analytical applications. The feasibility and possibility of using HNTs@MIPs as sensors for nutrient detection in hydroponic system is also discussed. We further comment on their potential future developments and research directions in the field of precision agriculture.
Author(s): Khadidja Gaffour, Mohammed Kamel Benhaoua, Abou El HassenBenyamina, Houssam Eddine Zahaf
Publication date: October 20, 2019
Publisher: International Journal of Computers and Applications
DOI: 10.1080/1206212X.2019.1679529
Abstract: Network on-Chip (NoC) is scalable, flexible, modular communication structure for Multi/Many-core architectures. It allows simpler interconnect models with higher bandwidth compared to bus-based architectures.When a message is exchanged inside an NoC, it passes through several routers. When the communication loadis high, contention and congestion may appear in central routers, and lead to an increased latency and powerconsumption. 3D NoC has been proposed as a solution to improve the performances, especially: throughput,latency, and energy efficiency. In this paper, we first report the results of theoretical and practical comparison between 2D and 3D mesh Network-on-Chip topology. We focus on communication supports, especiallyrouting, in the goal of reducing latency and avoiding congestion. Further, we propose a novel exhaustive routing algorithm to avoid and reduce congestion in 2D and 3D NoC. Also, we discuss the implementation of theproposed algorithm in both topologies and the trade-off between their overheads and their performances.We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm using a wide set of synthetic experiments using NOXIMsimulator.
Author(s): Chawki Benchehida, Mohammed Kamel Benhaoua, Houssam Eddine Zahaf, Giuseppe Lipari
Publication date: October 29, 2019
Publisher: HAL
DOI: 10.1145/3412821.3412822
Abstract: This paper presents Real-Time Network-on-chip-based architecture Analysis and Simulation tool (ReTiNAS), with a special focus on real-time communications. It allows fast and precise exploration of real-time design choices onto NoC architectures. ReTiNAS is an event-based simulator written in Python. It implements different real-time communication protocols and tracks the communications within the NoC at cycle level. Its modularity allows activating and deactivating different NoC components and easily extending the implemented protocols for more customized simulations and analysis. Further, we use ReTiNAS to perform a comparative study of analysis and simulation for different communication protocols using a wide set of synthetic experiments.
Author(s): Houssam Eddine Zahaf and Giuseppe Lipari
Publication date: June 09, 2020
Publisher: RTNS 2020: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Real-Time Networks and Systems
DOI: 10.1145/3394810.3394826
Abstract: Many recent computing platforms combine CPUs with different types of accelerators such as Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), to cope with the increasing computation needs of complex realtime applications. However, most hardware accelerators have not been designed to provide predictable timing-behavior to support real-time tasks. Moreover, they do not provide efficient preemption mechanisms.In this work, we present the design of a software library to program and execute real-time tasks onto hardware accelerators (e.g. GPUs) that exhibit limited-preemption capabilities with variables costs. The library provides: 1) parallel execution for real-time applications within the same accelerator; 2) the choice of different partitioned scheduling algorithms (FP, EDF, Gang-EDF); 3) support for (limited) task preemption. We describe a user space implementation of the library as a proof of concept. We also present a schedulability analysis for real-time tasks programmed using this platform, in particular for partitioned EDF and GANG-EDF. The effectiveness of the proposed scheduling strategies and their analyses is demonstrated through 1) actual measurements on a GPU platform, and 2) through synthetic task sets.
Author(s): Ikram Senoussaoui, Houssam Eddine Zahaf, Mohammed Kamel Benhaoua, Giuseppe Lipari,Richard Olejnik
Publication date: June 09, 2020
Publisher: RTNS 2020: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Real-Time Networks and Systems
DOI: 10.1145/3394810.3394821
Abstract: Deferred-preemption model has been proposed as a compromise between fully preemptive and non-preemptive systems: on one hand they reduce the cache related preemption delays; on the other hand they introduce a small blocking time to higher priority tasks. In this paper, we investigate the problem of allocating a set of real-time tasks with fixed-preemption points onto an identical multi-core platform.We first propose enumerative and branch-and-bound optimal algorithms, along with techniques to reduce their execution time. Further, we propose a set of heuristics to solve the same problem. We demonstrate the performances of the proposed approaches by the means of a large set of synthetic experiments.
Author(s): Karima Berramla, El Abbassia Deba, Jiechen Wu, Houari Sahraoui, Abou El Hassen Benyamina
Publication date: 2020
Publisher: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - MODELSWARD
ISBN: 978-989-758-400-8
Abstract: In the last decade, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) has experienced rapid growth in the software development community. In this context, model transformation occupies an important place that automates the transitions between development steps during the application production. To implement this transformation process, we require mastering languages and tools, but more importantly the semantic equivalence between the involved input and output metamodels. This knowledge is in general difficult to acquire, which makes transformation writing complex, time-consuming, and error-prone. In this paper, we propose a new model transformation by example approach to simplify model transformations, using Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). Our approach exploits the power of SMT by converting models in natural language texts and by processing them using models trained with IBM1 model.
Author(s): A. Dahane, R. Benameur, B. Kechar, A. Benyamina
Publication date: December 25, 2020
Publisher: 2020 International Symposium on Networks, Computers and Communications (ISNCC)
DOI: 10.1109/ISNCC49221.2020.9297341
Abstract: Smart farming allows to analyze the growth of plants and to influence the parameters of our system in real time in order to optimize plant growth and support the farmer in his activity. Internet of Things (IoT) arrangements, based on the application particular sensors data measurements and intelligent processing, are bridging the holes between the cyber and physical worlds. In this paper, we propose the design and the experiment of a smart farming system based on an intelligent platform which enables prediction capabilities using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. This system is based on the technology of wireless sensor networks and its implementation requires three main phases, i) data collection phase using sensors deployed in an agricultural field, ii) data cleaning and storage phase, and iii) predictive processing using some AI methods.
Author(s): Khadidja Gaffour, Mohammed Kamel Benhaoua, Somdip Dey, Amit Kumar Singh, Abou El Hassen Benyamina
Publication date: December 21, 2020
Publisher: 2020 Second International Conference on Embedded & Distributed Systems (EDiS)
DOI: 10.1109/EDiS49545.2020.9296439
Abstract: Networks-on-Chips have been suggested as a powerful solution to communication problems in multi/many-core architectures. The communications mapping consists of one of the crucial steps in architectural exploration in NoC-based multi/many-core architectures. Most works that are reported in the literature use virtual static clustering (the platform is devised in a different region with the same size). Parallelized mapping of communications tasks of the same application onto different regions causes degradation of system performance, especially when the number of tasks is greater than the number of processors of the chosen cluster. In this paper, a new dynamic clustering mapping strategy is proposed to place all the tasks of the same application in the same region. We have applied our proposed approach under different heuristics of applications tasks mapping. Comparative study of our proposed strategy provides significant performance improvements over the static clustering methodology.
Author(s): Chawki Benchehida, Mohammed Kamel Benhaoua, Houssam-Eddine Zahaf, Giuseppe Lipari
Publication date: December 21, 2020
Publisher: 2020 Second International Conference on Embedded & Distributed Systems (EDiS)
DOI: 10.1109/EDiS49545.2020.9296446
Abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of analyzing the behavior of a set of real-time tasks on a Network-on-chip-based (NoC) architecture. Our approach is to transform the allocation of tasks and communications within a NoC into a classical real-time allocation problem. It provides an extension of classical bin-packing heuristics to allocate a set of real-time applications modeled using a directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to a set of processors interconnected through a NoC.The paper describes the schedulability analysis, including allocation and communication. It provides also a comparative study of different allocation and communication algorithms and presents accordingly a set of promising research insights.
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