Virtual tractor open architecture - design and implementation of an open system

Software Ecosystems are a new trend today and the main concept is promoting interconnectivity between software and systems across different organizations to operate in conjunction to provide improved services. The Smart Ecosytems project represent an evolution of this concept and its goal is to bring together information and embedded systems. In this context, the Living Lab Smart Farming has been created to demonstrate how this can be achieved in the agricultural domain. As part of the Living Lab, a tractor controlled by software has been proposed. It received the name VTractor, and its architecture has been documented. This report introduces an enhanced version of this model, which introduces openness. The objective is to allow for the functionality of the tractor to be extended in a reasonable amount of time and with small effort. Throughout the sections of this document the main aspects of the initial version of the open tractor model are presented, i.e. its main drivers, design decisions, internal structure, functional aspects, deployment and others. These concepts presented here are being put into use a demonstrator of the Living Lab, where toy tractors and implements are used to validate the ideas and gradually integrate more complex functionality with the final goal of having a completely connected ecosystem.