A recommendation for suitable technologies for an indoor farming framework

Abstract

Facing food insecurity and overuse of resources due to effects of climate change, humanity needs to find new ways to secure food production and produce close to consumers. Vertical farming, where plants are grown in vertical arrays inside buildings with help of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) components, could contribute to solving this issue. Such systems integrate heterogeneous devices on different computing layers and acquire a lot of data to monitor and optimize the production process. We created an indoor testing unit in which growing conditions can be monitored and controlled to optimize growth of microgreens. This setup includes an Indoor Farming Support as a Service (IFSaaS) prototype that provides safe and secure monitoring and controlling, as well as self-adaption of an indoor farming system. In this article we provide information about the combination of most suitable technologies.