Designing and modeling an IoT-based software system for land suitability assessment use case

Abstract

Assessing the quality of land is a very important step that precedes the planning of land use and taking management decisions; for example, in the agricultural field, it can be used to evaluate the suitability of the land for planting crops, determine the suitable irrigation system type, or adjust the agricultural inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides according to the requirements of each zone in the land. The spatial–temporal dynamic nature of land characteristics entails also updated evaluation process and updated management plan. The present paper tries to exploit the advances in information and communication technologies to develop a conceptual design of a dynamic system that accommodates the spatial–temporal dynamics of the agricultural soil characteristics to realize a land suitability assessment (LSA) based on a factor analysis method. The proposed design combines IoT technologies, web development, database, and digital mapping and tries to consolidate the system with other functionalities useful for decision support and suitable for different cases. The paper conducted a survey and made comparisons to select the best technologies that fit the current use case implementation and presents its reproducible conceptual modeling by developing the static and dynamic views through schemas, diagrams, message sequence charts, IoT messaging topic tree, pseudocode, etc. The functionality of the design was validated with a simple implementation of the system model. To our knowledge, there is no previous significant contribution that has addressed a LSA IoT use case. The proposed design automates the LSA process for more accurate decision-making, saving cost, time, and effort consumed in repeated field trips. It is characterized by flexibility and centralization in its offered services of spatial analysis, detection, visualizations, and status monitoring. The design also allows for remote control of field machinery.