AEF Plugfest Sets Participation Records

Outreach

AEF Plugfest Sets Participation Records

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

The Agricultural industry Electronics Foundation hosted its European Plugfest last month in Bologna, Italy, and set records for the most devices tested and overall attendance.

The purpose of the event is for agricultural equipment manufacturers, technology producers, and software providers to come together and directly test the compatibility of their systems and products based on the ISO 11783 standard and AEF’s implementation guidelines and conformance tests. AEF holds a similar event in North America in the first quarter of the year.

The testing is essentially speed-dating for ag electronics. Participants have a 30-minute window where they connect a server and client, generally that means a tractor/terminal and an implement. The two sides test various capabilities to see what works and what might not go as expected. For the FMIS testing it is a little different, they test if a work order (prescription) generated by the software system loads properly in the terminal and if a work record (as-applied) file loads correctly in the software system. This testing helps see where one company may have implemented the standard differently than others or in some cases where the standard or implementation guidelines are vague and need more clarity. There are also AEF stations where participants connect to see if their products pass the different conformance tests AEF manages.

This year there were 47 servers (most ever) and 70 clients testing as well as 5 FMIS software tools with about 320 people in attendance. There was also some special testing with an area setup for Tractor-Implement Management (TIM), a standard from AEF that allows an implement to control tractor capabilities. An example would be a round baler “telling” the tractor when to run a hydraulic remote to eject a bale after wrapping is complete.

This was also the first Plugfest where companies were able to do the Agricultural Interoperability Network (AgIN) conformance test. This conformance test allows software tools to confirm they are following the AgIN specification for connecting user accounts between their systems and also test the use cases they support. Currently AgIN has use cases for machine tracking, allowing a user to see telematics data like where equipment is and its status from multiple brands in a single portal. The second use case supports sending and receiving of ISOXML work orders and work records between systems.

In addition to all the testing there are multiple meetings held during the week. These are some of the AEF project teams that take the opportunity to get together face-to-face and make progress or align with other AEF teams. AgGateway was there to participate in these meetings, focusing on areas of collaboration with the AgIN and Autonomy (AUT) teams. Future use cases within AgIN are likely to leverage the ADAPT Standard to help exchange master data like field boundaries. Similarly, there is work coordinating the requirements from the AUT team to make sure the ADAPT Standard “High fidelity” field boundary is covering their needs.

It was exciting to see so many competitors dedicating the time and resources to come together in one place and working to ensure compatibility between machines and software. Farmers and service providers need these systems to work together to not only to carry out field operations but to also efficiently and accurately use and collect data critical to their operations.