Decision support systems for agriculture 4.0: Survey and challenges

Resumen

Undoubtedly, high demands for food from the world-wide growing population are impacting the environment and putting many pressures on agricultural productivity. Agriculture 4.0, as the fourth evolution in farming technology, puts forward four essential requirements: increasing productivity, allocating resources reasonably, adapting to climate change, and avoiding food waste. As advanced information systems and Internet technologies are adopted in Agriculture 4.0, enormous farming data, such as temperature, humidity, soil conditions, marketing demands, and land uses, can be collected, analyzed, and processed for assisting farmers in making appropriate decisions and obtaining higher profits. Therefore, agricultural decision support systems for Agriculture 4.0 has become a very attractive topic for the research community. The objective of this paper aims at improving future agricultural decision support systems to better serve Agriculture 4.0. In this paper, the systematic literature review technique is used to survey thirteen representative decision support systems, including their applications for agricultural mission planning, water resources management, climate change adaptation, and food waste control. Each decision support system is introduced and analyzed under a systematic manner. A comprehensive evaluation is conducted from the aspects of interoperability, scalability, accessibility, usability, etc. Based on the evaluation result, upcoming challenges of employing agricultural decision support systems in Agriculture 4.0 are detected and summarized, suggesting the development trends and highlighting direct insights for future research.