Automation of Agriculture Support Systems using Wisekar: Case study of a crop-disease advisory service

•Framework to provide value-add to an agricultural advisory system is presented.•The advisory system is located at RTBI, IIT Madras Research Park.•The framework to support the system is based on Wisekar, http://wisekar.iitd.ac.in.•An automated crop-disease recognition application is developed with the framework.•Performance of the application is evaluated for various scenarios.

In the recent years, there has been a major thrust in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to boost agricultural production. These efforts include setting up of agricultural advisory systems for farmers to address crop-related problems. We present a framework developed by us to rapidly expand the range of services offered by one such agricultural advisory system (that uses a call-centre approach) located at IITM’s RTBI, Chennai, in the state of Tamil Nadu. The framework has been developed around an Internet-of-Things repository, Wisekar (http://wisekar.iitd.ac.in), located at IIT Delhi, which supports machine-to-machine communication between heterogeneous systems. We use Wisekar to propose and implement a distributed Automated Crop-disease Advisory Service (ACAS) in which Wisekar acts as a communication bridge between the advisory system and the software for crop-disease recognition. The response-time performance of ACAS for different placement configurations of its component systems is evaluated to support its strategic deployment for different situations.