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Modelling deployment costs of Precision Agriculture Monitoring Systems

Smart farming monitoring systems require notable investments and careful financial planning in order to be adopted by agricultural businesses in their current state. There is a variety of expenses involved towards employing remote sensing capabilities and data analysis methods for different kind of cultivation fields. Each agricultural business should take into consideration specific deployment and operational costs towards adjusting smart monitoring to its every day routine and acquire maximum performance results.

However, the specification of these expenses vary according to (a) the type of crops monitored, b) prioritization of the goals and c) the capabilities of each agricultural business and its assets. Agricultural businesses are in need of guidance when it comes to the adoption of technological advancements especially in the case when a carefully planned operation can produce a significant amount of profits.

Farmers or agriculture companies can tailor a SWOT analysis to specific kinds of cultivation, in deciding whether to employ such a system or not.

There is also a variety of deployment and operational costs to be considered by farmers in order to employ precision agriculture technologies into their business.

Deployment costs include hardware costs, software costs, networking costs, installation and integration costs, training costs, licensing costs and new hires costs.

On the other hand, operational costs are associated with the maintenance and administration of an agricultural business utilizing a smart farming monitoring system on a day-to-day basis. Such costs refer to real estate expenses, personnel wages, as well as repair and maintenance expenses.

So a decision model is required aiming to help farmers aggregate all relevant economic aspects of utilizing a precision agriculture monitoring system in their business. In order to design a personalized financial plan for each agricultural
business, the identification of the expenses accompanying this endeavor is required.

The proposed model, presented in the following figure, is consisted of a series of decisions to be made by the farmer towards specifying the according expenses.

More specifically the agricultural business should define the following:

  • The type of operational environment of the monitoring platform
  • The goals and quality indices
  • The cultivation calendar
  • The deployment strategy

This blog post is part of the paper Modelling deployment costs of Precision Agriculture Monitoring Systems, A. Triantafyllou, P. Sarigiannidis, S. Bibi, F. Vakouftsi and P. Vassilis,  2020 16th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS), 2020, pp. 252-259, doi: 10.1109/DCOSS49796.2020.00048.

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Anna Triantafyllou


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