Frameworks for developing an Agro-Prosumer Community Group platform

Abstract

Background The involvement of prosumers in the form of agricultural community groups has been acknowledged, and interest in it is increasing due to local food demand and quality of food. How to create a prosumer group? The definition of agro-prosumers and analysis of their behaviour, engaging new members to the existing groups, managing members and their goals are important factors to consider. Hence, to overcome this barrier and to improve the participation of prosumers, in this paper three key frameworks are presented to develop an Agro-Prosumer Community Group (APCGs) platform. Methods A conceptual process that consist of strict multiple stages i.e., requirement analysis, design logic, theoretical fundamentals, implementation of prototype and verification, is used to build the frameworks for APCG. Different methods and approaches are used to design and develop framework’s prototype. For instance, clustering algorithms are used to define and group agro-prosumer concept, an approach is developed that evaluates real-time production behaviour of new prosumers while engaging them to APCG. Finally, the goal-ranking techniques i.e., MCGP are used to build a goal management framework that effectively reaches a compromise between diverse goals of APCGs. Results Results for each framework is shown while verifying the prototype using prosumers data. Conclusion An Agro-Prosumer Community Group addresses three key issues relevant to the development of an agro-prosumer community-based approach to manage the prosumers in local food- and carbon-sharing networks. The key contributions are (1) APCG concept, (2) Prosumer engagement framework, and (3) Goal management framework. Thus APCG platform provides a seamless structure for carbon and produce sharing network.