Meeting digital challenges in the sector

The wine industry—like all business sectors —has undergone a digital revolution. This transformation has provided a unique opportunity for stakeholders in this sector to benefit from very high definition information and thus enhance monitoring and management of their production systems. New technologies have led to a marked increase in data that can be acquired through wireless sensor networks or weather stations, machine-mounted or hand-held data logging systems, and remote-sensing platforms (unmanned aerial vehicules, airborne devices, satellites). Data concerning vines and the vineyard environment (climate, soil, etc.), as well as wine processing, making and marketing processes, are acquired at an unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution. This generates very high flows of diverse data which have to be processed, analysed, shared, disseminated and stored prior to their use and development. An incredible wealth of high volume data is now available, which could serve to design very effective decision support tools for the wine industry , provided professionals have access to tailored methods to develop their products in response to market trends and climate change. These methods must meet a dual challenge. First, all upstream (agricultural and environmental) and downstream (transformation processes, consumption patterns, etc.) data must be linked via advanced data integration techniques, knowledge (disciplinary or business related) and models. Secondly, knowledge must be extracted from data by modelling and/or by inference on phenomena whose complexity has until now been hard to grasp. The tools and methods developed will facilitate assessment and management of new systems while ensuring the sustainability of the sector through an integrative approach. They will meet needs with regard to representation, diagnosis, assessment and decision support for various issues, including crop protection, environmental assessment, input management, product quality management, etc. New complex system design methods will also be proposed for innovations in, for instance, equipment sizing and types, while developing new cropping systems, breeding new varieties adapted to new constraints, and capturing new market shares. The Agropolis scientific community has the expertise and facilities necessary to come up with effective responses to the major challenges of the digital revolution. They raise research issues for the entire viticulture and wine sector at organizational, spatial and temporal scales. Several research units are aware of the importance of digital challenges in the fields of agronomy and environment. They hence focus their methodological research—in collaboration with their national and international, public and private partners—on addressing the challenges that arise. The fact that specialized engineering science, mathematics and informatics research units, as well as thematic research units in viticulture, ecophysiology, oenology, etc., are pooled within Agropolis promotes interdisciplinarity and is a prime asset. A first type of research concerns issues associated with measurements obtained via automated or manual recording devices. They encompass the design of: i) new sensors, ii) methods to ensure data quality, and iii) innovative systems for organizing and sharing information. A second type of research deals with specific issues related to the influx of geolocalized data in the precision viticulture framework, e.g. the design of spatial data sampling and processing methods that take wine trade knowledge into account. Finally, the last type brings together research in different areas: i) the analysis of huge volumes of heterogeneous data (spatiotemporal) collected in vineyards or wine cellars, ii) data- and knowledge-based modelling, and iii) simulation-based modelling. A major share of the research conducted by the community in all of the fields presented in this chapter concerns the effective use of data via simulation and decision-support software packages, which are essential for identifying new uses and implementing innovative practices