Components based integrated management platform for flexible service deployment in plant factory

Abstract

The plant factory is a facility that aid growers to make the steady production of high-quality vegetables and ornamental plants all year round by artificially controlling the cultivation environment such as indoor temperature and humidity. There are various types of plant factory such as fully artificial light-type, sunlight-type and plastic house, etc. In this paper, we propose Intelligent Greenhouse Integrated Management Platform (IGIMP) that can support a variety of plant factory type with the flexible service deployment. To optimize the environment for crop growth automatically, it gathers environmental context information from various indoor sensors as well as outdoor sensors and provides appropriate control functions using the convergence of ubiquitous computing and agriculture technologies. Finally, we introduce implementation through small plant factory prototype a kind of fully artificial light-type greenhouse. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.