Resilient Smart Garden

Introduction

This document describes the resilient smart garden project that is currently under development at CSULB to showcase the software engineering for sustainability concepts. The project definition provides an overview about the system requirements, stakeholders, system vision, system specification and the goal model.

The project consists of developing a smart garden system environment able to auto monitor the humidity and water amount in the garden and provide the resources the plants need.

The system under consideration is a project prototype developed using an Edison board and permaculture principles, which allow for sustainable long-term garden cultivation with maximum harvest based on the natural capacity of the soil enhanced by well-planned companion planting. The system vision is to connect a growing bed via sensors to an Edison board such that we can measure moisture and temperature and log that data. This will enable to determine the minimally feasible amount of watering, which is an environmentally sustainable measure in drought-prone Southern California. Future extensions include a connection to a plant database (to calculate typical needs of plants in the growing bed), to a database with geological information (to better predict the soil conditions), and a plant guild composer (work by Juliet Norton from UCI). This system will enable people with little background in gardening to successfully grow vegetables in the most sustainable and resource-conserving way.

System Requirements

This paragraph contains the needed components to the system works completely. The table below has those components and its description. Since the system is not developed yet, the system requirements are expected to be updated during the development process.

Stakeholder Model

The stakeholder model links the smart garden project with the participants of the project with different characteristics, such as the project leader, advisor, garden owner and the students.

The stakeholders of the project will be affected by it in different ways, for example, the students involved on the smart garden system, will acquire new knowledge on system sustainability. The garden owner will provide the garden to be part of a solving the water problem that the state of California is currently facing. The project leader and the advisor will be directing the project to working in a sustainable environment concept.

System Specification

This topic explain technically how the system works, including every component of the project and its functions. The main goal of the system is to provide a smart control of the garden, by irrigating the garden based on the informations collected by the humidity sensor attached to the solo. the system life cycle starts when the humidity sensor collect the diagnostic about the garden, information as solo humidity and temperature will be sent to the server to be registered and compared to the information already registered if there is any. The server will response back to the humidity sensor after register and compare the collected data. The response will be the action that has to be done by the water can, if the plants needs water or not, if the do, the sensor will send a request to the water can provide water for the garden.

The collected data from the sensor will be sent to web client application to be analysed by the garden owner, this will provide a better knowledgment about the garden in a dynamic and interactive way.

System Vision (System Structure)

This topic consist in to demonstrate the general vision of the system, including the system specification as well. The system vision relate the stakeholders with the respectives responsibilities and participation in the resilient smart garden project. In the figure below is explained the relation between the project leader, project developers and advisors, all related in single block. On the other side, there is the system requirements specification, demonstrating how the system is going to work, and its overflow. Another part of the system vision is the garden owner, he is directly related to the system specification, since he is going to manipulate the website interface to analysis the smart garden diagnostic. The last part of the system vision is the system expert, this part is responsible to install and maintain the system in the garden, he is related to the system specification and the garden owner.

Goal Model

The goal model provides an overview of the goals and objectives for the system, with goals and subgoals that the system will achieve and the goals to achieve proper development of the system.

On top of this model is the main goal, where the whole project is based, below are the goals that have to be fulfilled first, is making the connection between goals that will make the main one possible.

Usage Model

The purpose of the usage model is to show how users can interact with the system and how the system responds to that. On these case the user will be the garden Owner and the system will be the Edison board and the humidity sensors, they will interact through a server that will receive all the user requests and send to the board and also receive the board answer, analyze and send to the user.

The user has many possibilities to interact with the system such as ask for a report, consult old reports, set system limits, and set a system pattern for a period of time.