i-BeeHOME: An Intelligent Stingless Honey Beehives Monitoring Tool Based On TOPSIS Method By Implementing LoRaWan – A Preliminary Study

This paper describes a preliminary study on the development of an intelligent bee hives monitoring tool called i-BeeHOME. This tool benefits LoRa and LoRaWan (LoRa in low power WANs) technology. This intelligent tool is capable to collect crucial information on bee colony hives in real-time despite of its remote location. The capability as a smart device of i-BeeHOME is further advanced when these information is then analyzed using one of the most well-known multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method, i.e. TOPSIS. Therefore, it is realized that the capability of i-BeeHOME is three-fold, i.e. (1) collects and retrieves crucial information from beehives despite of its remote/rural location where WiFi/BLE based networks are ineffective by using LoRa technology, (2) analyzes information collected to predict the conformity of bee hives location for high quality of honey production by using TOPSIS method, and (3) tracking the geographical location of beehives in protecting it from being stolen/lost by using LoRaWAN technology. It is expected that the development of this tool will not only help the beekeepers to monitor honey beehives with minimum effort, but also implicitly allows further investigation on how to promote high quality of honey production by stingless bees.