Deriving Experiments from E-SECO Software Ecosystem in the Technology Transfer Process for the Livestock Domain

The process of transferring technology from research institutes to industry involves benchmarking it in exhaustive experiments to assure it reaches the established quality criteria. This is also true for the livestock domain, in which the technologies developed to sustainably raise animals production are submitted to experiments while preserving their health and wellness. However, since such institutions often conduct several parallel innovation projects, the establishment of an infrastructure to support those experiments can be costly, repetitive, and error-prone. For that purpose, we developed E-SECO, a software ecosystem that encapsulates a lifecycle model for scientific experiments and its supporting platform and actors. The main contribution of this paper is presenting how the E-SECO architecture was successfully applied to create a livestock architecture (named e-Livestock architecture) from which two different (and independent) scientific experiments involving real systems were deployed and executed in the livestock domain. The first experiment involved a Compost Barn production system, i.e., the environment and surrounding technology where bovine milk production takes place; whilst the second experiment involved an automated monitoring environment for aviaries. Preliminary results showed the effectiveness of E-SECO to (i) abstract concepts of scientific experiments for livestock domain, (ii) support reuse and derivation of an architecture to support engineering real systems for different livestock sub-domains, and (iii) support the experiments towards a future transfer of technology to industry.CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing → Agriculture; • Software and its engineering → Software architectures.