ISOF: Information Scheduling and Optimization Framework for Improving the Performance of Agriculture Systems Aided by Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 is a promising evolution in the field of smart farming by improving the productivity and reducing human intervention to modernize agriculture. This smart paradigm incorporates different levels of the automation from cropping to production yield through sophisticated techniques. Different intelligent computing techniques and communication technologies are augmented with the industry paradigm for improving the efficiency of agriculture systems. This letter introduces information scheduling and optimization framework (ISOF) for optimizing the communication and information layer process in industry 4.0 architecture. Information scheduling and classification of agriculture information are optimized through this framework for reducing process latency and stagnancy. The control flexibility of a smart farm is determined using the latency and stagnancy at the end of yields. The classification part segregates information based on processing and completion time to reduce backlogs through offloading process. The advantage of this framework is that it inherits the advantages of Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing (EC) technologies with interoperable feature to aid information processing, information classification, offloading, and periodic updates. The performance of the proposed framework is tested in a corn farm and some common metrics, such as delayed information, processing time, audit data, and information distribution, are analyzed for proving the reliability of the framework.