applied sciences Article A Context-Aware Middleware Cloud Approach for Integrating Precision Farming Facilities into the IoT toward Agriculture 4.0 Eleni Symeonaki 1,2, Konstantinos Arvanitis 1,* and Dimitrios Piromalis 2 1 Department of Natural Resources Management and Agricultural Engineering, Agricultural University of Athens, Iera Odos 75, 11855 Athens, Greece;
[email protected] 2 Department of Industrial Design and Production Engineering, University of West Attica, Thivon 250 and P. Ralli, 12244 Egaleo, Greece;
[email protected] * Correspondence:
[email protected] Received: 24 December 2019; Accepted: 20 January 2020; Published: 23 January 2020 Abstract: The adoption of Precision Farming (PF) practices involving ubiquitous computing advancements and conceptual innovations of “smart” agricultural production toward Agriculture 4.0 is a significant factor for the benefit of sustainable growth. In this context, the dynamic integration of PF facility systems into the Internet of Things (IoT) represents an excessive challenge considering the large amount of heterogeneous raw data acquired in agricultural environments by Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSANs). This paper focuses on the issue of facilitating the management, process, and exchange of the numerous and diverse data points generated in multiple PF environments by introducing a framework of a cloud-based context-aware middleware solution as part of a responsive, adaptive, and service-oriented IoT integrated system. More particularly, the paper presents in detail a layered hierarchical structure according to which all functional elements of the system cope with context, while the context awareness operation is accomplished into a cloud-based distributed middleware component that is the core of the entire system acting as a Decision Support System (DSS).