Over the last few years, tractors have evolved into complex, technological and smart operating machines, capable of renewing and revolutionizing the farming procedures. The EU is particularly observant to environment, health and sustainability and has launched the Green Deal, with the goal of reducing drastically the pesticides and chemicals used in agriculture, among other actions contained in the Farm to Fork strategies.

Soluzioni Ingegneria response to these challenges is AgriSIm. AgriSIm is an agricultural simulation environment that allows to co-simulate the agricultural convoy vehicle dynamics and the precision farming operations, thus replicating the smart farming routines in the virtual world.

The vehicle dynamics is handled by TruckMaker, where both the tractor and the implements physical models are solved, while the precision farming is solved by AgriSIm itself, based on the stream of data coming from the vehicle dynamics and the simulation environment.

AgriSIm has proved to replicate the real-world phenomena in dedicated validation campaigns, where the numerical results have been compared with the experimental data, in terms of both vehicle dynamics, both on asphalt and on plastic soil, and precision farming. To simulate on-field tractor-soil interaction, the tire files (Magic Formula *.tir have been scaled to comply with the phenomenological effects seen in experimental tests. For the precision farming, a fertilizing operation executed on a specific field has been replicated on the virtual twin of that field, with a 5% difference in key quantities.

With the simulation environment validated, the sensitivity and extrapolation possibilities are countless, as opposed to reality, where most of farming operations can be executed only once per year and making experiments could even damage the field.

AgriSIm comes in two versions, the Office one, that runs on a normal PC, and the Simulator one, that allows the driver to enter in the farming loop. AgriSIm can also be integrated into HIL systems to test every single aspect of smart farming, exploiting the ISOBUS protocol.