Unified Digital Platform Agro-Industrial Complex of Russia as a

Mechanism for Overcoming Digital Feudalism

Victor Medennikov

, Ludmila Muratova

and Sergey Salnikov

Computer Center of A.A. Dorodnitsyn of FRC "Computer Science and Control" of RAS, Moscow, Russian Federation

VIAPI n.a. A.A. Nikonov - branch of the FSBSIFRC AESDRA VNIIESH, Moscow, Russian Federation

Keywords: Agro-industrial complex, digital platform, digital feudalism.

Abstract: The article is devoted to the search for the agro-industrial complex of Russia ways to overcome the negative

consequences of abandoning the OGAS project back in the USSR, which currently allows the formation of a

unified digital platform for managing the country’s economy, and ways to overcome the peculiar digital

feudalism generated as a result of this due to the erosion of the tasks of the digital economy by state

corporations. For this, the results of mathematical modeling of the formation of a digital platform for

managing the economy of an agro-industrial complex during the transition to the digital era are considered,

the calculations for which formed digital standards that integrate all components of the information space of

the industry. It is shown that the cloud interaction of all enterprises based on these standards makes digital

technologies available for farms of all sizes, and not just for some of the largest of them. This standardization

will also affect cross-sectoral relationships between all participants in the value chain.

1 INTRODUCTION

Based on the dramatically increased number of works

and speeches on the digital economy (DE) in the past

three years, it seems that digital technologies

appeared unexpectedly, all at once as a result of some

revolutionary scientific discovery capable of solving

all the problems of Russian reality (Russia, 2020).

Thus, (Khalin, 2018) states that digitalization

replaced computerization and informatization, the

technologies of which were used only to solve certain

economic problems. Similarly, pursuant to Shklyaruk

(Shklyaruk, 2), informatization is opposed to the

digitalization process, in the first only purely existing

processes are being automated, and in the second

case, existing processes are already being enhanced

by reengineering them and analyzing data when

making decisions. And there is a lot of similar

"researches". For a specialist in the field of

information technology, such statements are

surprising, since they do not correspond to the entire

prehistory of informatization of society.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4485-7132

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4030-0599

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7952-4496

In this regard, the digitalization of the agro-

industrial complex (AIC) needs a theoretical

understanding of this stage of the development of

informatization (digitalization) of the industry with a

systematic analysis of the results of the previous

stages of the introduction of information and

communication technologies (ICT) to develop

fundamentally new approaches to the effective

implementation of the innovative capabilities of

information technologies. adequate to the coming era

of digital transformation of the economy, since the

country continues to use information systems design

technologies that have developed in previous periods

and are more familiar to most developers.

2 MANUSCRIPT MATERIALS

AND METHODS

Let us consider the evolution of ICT in a time frame

to refute the thesis about the appearance of DE, in

fact, from scratch. In our opinion, in its life cycle,

330

Medennikov, V., Muratova, L. and Salnikov, S.

Uniﬁed Digital Platform Agro-Industrial Complex of Russia as a Mechanism for Overcoming Digital Feudalism.

DOI: 10.5220/0010702100003169

In Proceedings of the International Scientiﬁc-Practical Conference "Ensuring the Stability and Security of Socio-Economic Systems: Overcoming the Threats of the Crisis Space" (SES 2021),

pages 330-335

ISBN: 978-989-758-546-3

information systems design technologies have gone

through four evolutionary stages, at each of which

there was a significant transformation of the methods

of storing, transferring and integrating data

(information resources) and software, based on the

fact that the information systems project space has

three main measurement axes: information resources

(IR), applications (automated tasks) and tools, which

are system-wide software and electronic equipment

(Fig. 1).

Figure 1: Project space of information systems.

In information systems, at the first stage, almost

all application software was developed by the efforts

of enterprise specialists. It was focused either on the

needs of a particular enterprise, or on the needs of a

narrow circle of similar enterprises. Herewith, it

required significant costs to support it. It was a

classic, so-called task-by-task approach.

The second stage is characterized by the

emergence of elements of standardization for

software, which is associated with the enhancement

of ICT, which led to cooperation and integration and

a decrease in the cost of software, the functionality of

the systems has expanded. This process made it

possible to optimize management functions and

information processing methods.

The third stage is associated with the emergence

of local area networks, database management systems

(DB). Herewith, both software and data were

physically and logically separated from specific

computing facilities and placed on virtual computers

in the nodes of local computer networks.

Herewith, starting from the second stage,

economic feasibility arose in replicating information

systems to a certain circle of enterprises, clearly

represented by the so-called Brooks square (Fig. 2),

which provides data on the increase in costs during

the transition from software development based on

original design to a software product and its

integration into a software package (Brooks, 2001).

Figure 2: Brooks square.

The work shows that the cost of a software

product replicated and integrated into some

information systems, even into the industry when

switching to a single DP, is an order of magnitude

higher than the cost of developing the original

software. Consequently, investments in complex

information systems will provide a level of

development self-sufficiency when implemented,

starting from the second dozen enterprises, the huge

economic effect of which is most obvious for AIC due

to a large number of enterprises.

Thus, the variety of information technologies

used, for the most part, ontologically and functionally

incompatible, have basically turned the theoretical

problem of integrating IR, applications and tools into

an extremely urgent in economic and practical terms,

the task of integrating them into a single information

and management environment during the transition to

the fourth stage. evolution of information systems

associated with the digital age (Zatsarinnyy, 2019a;

Zatsarinnyy, 2019b). This task cannot be resolved

without coordination of digital standards on all axes

of design space of information systems.

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

If at the second or third stages, economic and

technological expediency led, in terms of integration

processes, to the emergence of international

management standards such as ERP, which are only

a methodology, and in logistics activities, standards

for the terms and concepts used, called SCOR models

(Toluev, 2009), then in the last 2-3 years in the US

cloud platforms and services based on the following

specialized platforms have begun to be widely used:

aggregator platforms for the primary collection and

accumulation of agricultural information and

application platforms (J’son, 2021). Cloud-based

Uniﬁed Digital Platform Agro-Industrial Complex of Russia as a Mechanism for Overcoming Digital Feudalism

331

interoperability based on already standards on all axes

of the project space between these platforms makes

them available to farms of all sizes, and not just to

some of the largest of them.

This standardization will already have an impact

on inter-industry relationships between

manufacturers, processors, logistics, wholesale and

retail companies through the development of cloud

technologies, a direct sales model, when all the links

in the chain "see" each other, down to the end

consumer, as well as terms, volumes, nomenclature.

and the quality of demand. In this case, the principle

of product traceability is implemented, since

production allows the transition from the phase of

quality control after its release to the principle of

operational control of all production operations.

Thus, we may conclude that with each new stage in

the evolution of information systems, the number of

enterprises subject to automation based on integration

and digital standardization grows with the potential

inclusion of entire industries and countries in such a

process.

In our country, back in the second half of the last

century, an attempt was made to outstrip the market

evolutionary path of integrating IR, applications and

tools for the development and maintenance of

information systems. Outstanding scientists Kitov

A.I. and academician Glushkov V.M. suggested that

the state leadership create a nationwide automated

system for collecting and processing information for

accounting, planning and managing the national

economy in the USSR (OGAS) (Benjamin, 2016).

The project was not adopted, which in the future

doomed the country to the original, task-oriented

design of information systems for many years,

moreover, the country slipped into a kind of digital

feudalism, since in Russia, when forming the DE

strategy, they decided to rely on a number of large

state corporations in its implementation. However, an

analysis of the evolution of information systems

shows that with such a corporate fragmentation of DE

performers, without a thorough study of the project

for the formation of a single digital space in Russia

on the basis of uniform agreed standards, without the

appointment of a general designer with the required

scientific and production base, the implementation of

DE tasks will be ineffective, rather, even impossible

... Integration of the developed branch DP will be

very labor-consuming and inefficient further.

This situation, aggravated by the destructive

consequences of market reforms, led to the fact that

most AIC enterprises stopped developing information

systems at the second stage, saving money (pursuant

to Brooks), were forced to limit their original design,

or acquire them on the market with significant

adaptation to their daily activities.

The analysis of monitoring of informatization of

300 best enterprises AIC has shown top trends of this

process (Kulba, 2020): at the considered time stage,

accounting software is being introduced, but even

they are often developed by several organizations,

while the software is neither informationally, nor

ontologically, nor ergonomically incompatible,

which indicates the absence of a strategy for

informatization of these enterprises.

This situation with information systems in AIC is,

on the one hand, a consequence of the refusal to

implement the OGAS project, when the refusal

served as a catalyst for a haphazard, non-

comprehensive approach to the process and

digitalization in the country, on the other hand, digital

feudalism, as a result of which a large number of

isolated and incompatible local information systems

at AIC enterprises, governing bodies, scientific and

educational institutions. According to our

calculations, with this development of events in the

near future, there will be potentially about 4,800,000

information systems, which are beginning to be

designated as DP, in the AIC with the same problems.

Moreover, this situation gave rise to the illusion

of the uselessness of scientific organizations,

systematically, from a complex position, dealing with

the digital transformation of society, economy and

science. Thus, with the tacit agreement of both the

Russian Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of

Agriculture, the Institute of Cybernetics AIC, which

was an integrator of scientific developments, was

eliminated (Fig. 3), and just before the adoption of the

DE Program and with the approval of FANO at the

Institute of Agrarian Problems and Informatics

(VIAPI), the research topic on DE AIC was closed,

the Timiryazev Academy did not turn into a center of

competence in DE, moreover, a testing ground where

the most advanced, promising digital technologies.

For example, such studies are given in the following

works (Kannan, 2019; Vecchio, 2020, Huang, 2018).

If we are closing innovation centers, in developed

countries, on the contrary, they are actively creating.

Thus, in the UK, in order to implement the ambitious

task of becoming leaders in the creation of new digital

technologies in agriculture, within the framework of

the state program "Transformation of food

production: from agricultural farm to plate",

innovation development centers are being created,

pursuing another goal - working out a new model of

government interaction. science and business

(Raikov, 2021).

SES 2021 - INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC-PRACTICAL CONFERENCE "ENSURING THE STABILITY AND SECURITY OF

SOCIO - ECONOMIC SYSTEMS: OVERCOMING THE THREATS OF THE CRISIS SPACE"

332

Figure 3: Scheme for the transfer of agricultural knowledge to production based on a single digital platform

Based on the considered evolution of ICT, which

resulted in the emergence of international

management standards; analysis of the rejection of

the ideas of OGAS, as a result of which a kind of

digital feudalism appeared; monitoring the

informatization of the 300 best AIC enterprises,

which confirmed the consequences of digital

feudalism in the form of the absence of a strategy for

integration processes in the digitalization of AIC by

the Ministry of Agriculture, it is proposed to use a

mathematical model for the formation of a unified DP

for managing the AIC economy as an effective tool

for the digitalization of the industry (Ereshko, 2018).

In this paper, we present an abbreviated version of the

core of the model so as not to go into the details of

cluster analysis, semantic adjacency matrices, and the

theory of automatic classification, which are required

for the correct determination of optimum DP in the

future.

Thus, we consider a system that includes a given

set of control centers j (the level of the Ministry of

Agriculture, region, district, enterprise, its structural

unit), a set of management applications K, used to

process information arrays on the data centers,

situational centers (SC); data classes L; types of

communication for data transmission R. It is assumed

that the entire control process takes place on a time

interval with a period of T with averaged actions on

this interval, which is due to finding the standards

used in the model, for instance, with data

transmission. Based on the capabilities of the fourth

stage of the evolution of IS, considered above, we will

assume that any task may be solved at any node. To

store and process data when solving management

problems, a certain amount of technical means is

required. Then let us enter model parameters.

k – identifier of the application, k



K; l – identifier

of information element, l



j – identifier of control center, j



kli

– averaged volumetric, time, frequency

requirements, etc. characteristics identifying

information of l-th group required for the solution of

application k generated in the center j, e



= 1, defines a condition under which

application k is solved in center j, 0 – otherwise;



kli

= 1, defines a condition under which the l-th

group is generated in center j for a problem k, 0 –

otherwise;



rjlj

1, if information from the l-th group is

transmitted from the

-th node to the

-th by the

r-th means of communication;

mjk

―required resources of the m-th type to

solve the task

at the j-th node;

―m-th equipment resources;



rjlj

1, if the r-th link type is used to transfer

the l-th group from the

-th to the

-th node;

―communication characteristics;

- the

cost of a piece of equipment in the

j-th node;

rjj

the cost of the r-th means of communication when

Uniﬁed Digital Platform Agro-Industrial Complex of Russia as a Mechanism for Overcoming Digital Feudalism

333

transferring information from

;

rjj

- the

cost of transferring a unit of information from

;

mjk

- the cost of the m-th resource for solving the

task

in the j-th node;

- generalized cost of the k-

th task;

- funds allocated for the development of a

digital platform.

Restrictions for possible requirements for

distribution of applications on the centers and

hardware components:

x 





K – condition of need of the solution of

application k at least in one center; x

≥ 1, j



, k



K, condition of need of the obligatory solution of

a part of applications from a set K in some centers j



Required conditions of information transfer from

center

to center j

12 1 2

lj j r klj j k









Data for application k is transferred from center j

to center j

if it occurs at center j

for use at center j

;

lj j r

y 



i.e. the information transfer from center

center j

is carried out by one communication means.

Restrictions for loading of the equipment:

mjk jk m

dx M



Restrictions for communication channels:

12 2 12

lj j r klj r j j r

yf Gs



Restrictions for investments:

12 12

12 50

,,, ,

jjk jjrjjr kjk

jk j j r jk

cx c s cx c

 

The efficiency criterion determines the

minimization of costs for the formation of an

optimum CP:

12 12 12 2 12

12 12

12 3

,,, ,,

j jk jjr jjr jjr klj ljjr

jk j j r j j r

cx c s c f y 

 

,, ,

min.

mjk mjk jk k jk

mjk jk

cdx cx



Based on this mathematical model, digital

standards were obtained, represented by uniform

conceptual and ontological models of technological

DBs for the entire agricultural industry (Ereshko,

2018). Herewith, a unified digital standard of the

information structure of primary accounting was

obtained in the following format: the type of the

operation being carried out, its object, the place of the

operation, the subject of the operation, the date of the

operation, the time interval of the operation, the

means of production used during the operation, the

volume of the operation, the type and the amount of

consumed resource herewith. With this structure, all

primary data of any enterprise may be stored in a

single cloud DB in a unified form (Kulba, V.,

Medennikov, V., 2020; Kannan, B., Rajasekar, M.,

Jayalakshmi, K., Thiyagarajan, G., Selvakumar, S.,

and Rajendran, V., 2019). This standard overlaps with

the above-mentioned platforms-aggregators for

primary collection and accumulation of agricultural

information being developed in the USA.

4 CONCLUSIONS

Analysis of the initial data of the model shows that to

use it, it is required to do a tremendous amount of

work on ontological modeling of all production

activities not only in AIC, but also in the country due

to large intersectoral ties with many sectors of the

national economy with the creation of uniform

standards for R&D, management functions and tools;

classifiers of a significant amount of resources related

to the DP. Taking into account, in addition, some

tunnel effect of overcoming the regularities of the

Brooks square, the Ministry of Telecom and Mass

Communications responded to the proposals for the

implementation of the DP presented above from

10.09.2019 that the implementation of this DP is

premature due to the lack of both human and financial

resources. Apparently, our country has forgotten how

to make large integration science-intensive projects.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by RFBR (grant № 20-07-

00836).

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