Made In Egypt, IEEE Egypt GOLD http://www.ieeegoldegypt.org/

FaaS (Food as a Service)

Faculty of Electronic Engineering Menoufia university

© 2013 Made In Egypt, IEEE Egypt GOLD 2

Introduction (Problem definition)

Information Technology is used in various fields like education, business, Medicine, Weather

forecasting systems, Communications… etc., but not vastly used in Agriculture sector. We

see increasing revenue in the agricultural industry as a key to overcoming challenges facing

the country with regards to food security, local economic development and job creation.

Yet, our current agricultural infrastructure is outdated and inefficient. Many do not calculate

production costs and revenue on a per crop basis. In the future, however, farmers will need

to start focusing on profitability, which will mean making more informed decisions about what

crops to grow. We have decided to make a project that help governments, research centers,

farmers and also companies in agriculture field to improve the agricultural sector by using the

latest technologies such as Cloud Computing and Big Data.

As we try to enhance the agricultural sector In Egypt by providing an innovative way to

manage agricultural information. The modern way for agriculture is “FaaS”, Food as a

Service. We’ve treated agriculture as some sort of traditional expired way as we don’t think

it’s become our vital sector of developing,

The most common issues responsible for that are:

We suffer a gap between research centers and farmers' work. Farmers plant their

fields using inherited experience based on what they used to do. Over the years,

we’ve become more sophisticated and decentralized about the average experience,

communication and production.

The food-related industry must respond to an increasing consumer demand for safer

foods of higher sensory quality that fulfill their nutritional needs and expectations. The

industry must develop, adapt and adopt technologies assuring food wholesomeness

and responding to consumer expectations while increasing the value added to

agricultural commodities, so as to benefit farmers. The development of such

processes requires broader and deeper knowledge of food properties starting from the

water properties, soil characteristics, seeds origins, fertilizers affectivity and pesticides

safety.

Marketing the yields for the rural farmers seems difficult that makes merchants almost

consume most of the yields profit which add more pressure on both the farmer and the

food processor making Food prices continue to rise.

New farmlands investments as smart / semi smart farms, indoor farming and soil free

agriculture still have a long way to take place in Egypt. It still need a great support like

computing power, some sort of intelligence to operate and maintain the farm which

allow the owner to remote monitor his farm and market his products . Robotic and

sensors which compile farmers Big Data are using to increase agility and

management.

Egyptian farms tend to be fairly simple. Farmers generally can't monitor output from

one year to the next, and with no data, it's difficult to make smart business decisions.

We are already seeing data sets from a multitude of sources which support faster and more reliable research and discovery. For farming, not just increasing the quantity of food, but also improving the quality.

© 2013 Made In Egypt, IEEE Egypt GOLD 3

Objectives (Problem Solution)

The SaaS-based agricultural production management solution will provide

comprehensive management tools for administration, production and sales. Farmers

will be make use of collecting, storing and analyzing data about on-farm operations,

crop plantings and yields via mobile and tablet devices. FaaS aims to help farmers

improve operations, earnings and efficiencies. Additionally, FaaS will offer innovation

support services.

FaaS will also offer services to food processors, wholesalers, retailers and

restaurants, allowing them to leverage this centrally managed data to manage orders

and quality control with their producers.

The Web form is used for solving on-site problems, answering any queries and

promoting Agricultural Extension easily and simply over cloud using mobiles or tablets.

The market segments, farmers, farms, and food-related industries, quantitative and qualitative needs are the creation of a fixed-time, fixed-quantity, fixed-quality, fixed-price supply model, and supporting improvements and enhanced efficiency.

The outcome – supported features and functionalities – of the project:

We build the system using Cloud Computing and Big Data definitions.

The system has much information about crops so we introduce Agriculture Extension

via cloud using SMSs and the web portal.

The system has a database of the characteristics of the soil and crops to determine

the best suited crop to be planted in a certain region.

The system has a database of many problems and diseases that harm plants and

introduce the solutions for these harm effects.

We design The Web form that is used for solving on-site problems, answering any

queries and promoting Agricultural Extension easily and simply over cloud using

mobiles or tablets.

Our project offers new outstanding features, services, deliverables and support:

Hosting and storing all the agricultural information and experience centralized on one

place being processed at, using powerful computing resources with plenty of storage

space available.

Centrally managing data, such as production schedules, production history, harvest

volume, and planting information, from the several hundred to several thousand

contract farm product suppliers across Egypt, the status of products can be

ascertained from the production stage. This enables contract producers to engage in

production management, supporting procurement based on a fixed-time, fixed-

quantity, fixed-quality, and fixed-price model.

On time reports, tips and procedures for planting and growing crops to highly increase yield output, avoid disastrous effects of bad events such as bad climate change, energy prices rising, market needs, agricultural pests.

© 2013 Made In Egypt, IEEE Egypt GOLD 4

Business Approach

The output of our project will be a Service

Business Model (Market and Competition) The main business objective of our project is to launch our startup company “FaaS” to compete strongly in the field of agriculture in Egypt to be a key to overcoming these challenges of improving food self-sufficiency, stimulating local economies, and expanding employment to expand earnings in the agricultural industry and improve international competitiveness, while at the same increasing the number of young agricultural workers.

The market segments of the service are farmers, farms, food-related companies.

The needs that our project addresses are the sponsorship to achieve our important

goals like networking, in business mean, and the cost of the hardware part and data

collection that will be solved by asking the government to help us in.

The targeted segments buy our service because of the advantage of Agriculture

Extension for farmers and famers, contract farming for farmers, farms, and food-

related companies, and guiding them to the best suited crop to be planted in a certain

area based on the soil characteristics and climate.

In Egypt, we consider that our project is the only one that employs systems are similar

to the Expert Systems in the management of the agriculture process so maybe there

are no strong competitors in this area.

Our competitive edge can be presented in using open source and cloud computing in our

system and the concept of contract farming that makes marketing more easily.

Technical Approach

The project is Hybrid Both HW and SW

Block Diagrams

© 2013 Made In Egypt, IEEE Egypt GOLD 5

Software/ Hardware Development Tools and components

Master Project Time Plan

Item Type (Hardware/Software)

Usage Price in EGP

IP camera Hardware monitoring the farms 1210

Arduino wireless kit

Hardware send data to the cloud platform 756.8

Control equipment and sensors

Hardware Collect data and send it to the kit 4816

Openstack Software free and powerful open source platform Free

Hadoop Software process all data to get valuable

information Free

KVM Software

Act as hypervisor for virtualization Free

CentOS Software Stable Open source Operating System Free

Ubuntu Software open source platform where we can run

Hadoop tools Free

Server Hardware the host for all virtual machines 5000

© 2013 Made In Egypt, IEEE Egypt GOLD 6

Project Photos/Screenshots

Cloud:

Centos operating system

© 2013 Made In Egypt, IEEE Egypt GOLD 7

Virt-manager (GUI for KVM hypervisor)

Openstack Horizon login page

© 2013 Made In Egypt, IEEE Egypt GOLD 8

Big Data:

Log in screen for Hortonworks workstation for training using Hive, Pig, and HBase.

these workstation Containing live example of :How to use Hadoop file system (HDFS) Also Map Reduce function.

Cloudera platform for Using Hadoop tools and how to deal with data (Moving data

from directory to the file system like XFS,GFS, and HDFS) storage.

© 2013 Made In Egypt, IEEE Egypt GOLD 9

Web:

That is our home page

This page contains services that our site provide to users

© 2013 Made In Egypt, IEEE Egypt GOLD 10

This page contains companies that we communicate with for marketing

To call us or send any feedback to us

© 2013 Made In Egypt, IEEE Egypt GOLD 11

That is our Registration page