Greenhouse industry 4.0 – digital twin technology for commercial greenhouses

Abstract

The project aims to create a Greenhouse Industry 4.0 Digital Twin software platform for combining the Industry 4.0 technologies (IoT, AI, Big Data, cloud computing, and Digital Twins) as integrated parts of the greenhouse production systems. The integration provides a new disruptive approach for vertical integration and optimization of the greenhouse production processes to improve energy efficiency, production throughput, and productivity without compromising product quality or sustainability. Applying the Industry 4.0 Digital Twin concept to the Danish horticulture greenhouse industry provides digital models for simulating and evaluating the physical greenhouse facility’s performance. A Digital Twin combines modeling, AI, and Big Data analytics with IoT and traditional sensor data from the production and cloud-based enterprise data to predict how the physical twin will perform under varying operational conditions. The Digital Twins support the co-optimization of the production schedule, energy consumption, and labor cost by considering influential factors, including production deadlines, quality grading, heating, artificial lighting, energy prices (gas and electricity), and weather forecasts. The ecosystem of digital twins extends the state-of-the-art by adopting a scalable distributed approach of “system of systems” that interconnects Digital Twins in a production facility. A collection of specialized Digital Twins are linked together to describe and simulate all aspects of the production chain, such as overall production capacity, energy consumption, delivery dates, and supply processes. The contribution of this project is to develop an ecosystem of digital twins that collectively capture the behavior of an industrial greenhouse facility. The ecosystem will enable the industrial greenhouse facilities to become increasingly active participants in the electricity grid.

A Scoping Review of Energy Load Disaggregation

“…Office buildings typically have numerous appliances, which would be expensive to individually submeter [83]. A significant portion of consumption comes from lighting, which is more difficult to submeter than plug-in devices [84].…”

Application of energy informatics in Danish research projects

“…Future research may be beneficial to conduct the energy research from a consumer perspective in which the flexibility implications are considered (Billanes et al 2017); most projects assume that the flexibility will be there without considering the discomfort induced to the provider. Generally, the inclusion of industrial energy flexibility has not been studied in detail by any of the reviewed projects besides specific case studies (Howard et al 2021a;Howard et al 2021c). Therefore, to enable large-scale use of industrial energy flexibility, it will be beneficial to develop a framework for evaluating the potential energy flexibility that can be supplied by industrial consumers based on their risk willingness (Vaerbak et al 2019).…”

Setting up a Digital Twin Assisted Greenhouse Architecture

“…In general, a greenhouse is necessary for the modification of climatic conditions internally in contrast to the external environment, to plant plants, and production of plant products regardless of the external climatic conditions. In case of an unwanted temperature rise, ventilation is necessary, while for cold nights or days, a heating system is necessary to maintain the desired temperature for plant growth (Howard et al, 2021;Verdouw et al, 2021;Pylianidis et al, 2021;Tekinerdogan and Verdouw, 2020;Monteiro et al, 2018;Howard et al, 2020a;Mukhtar et al, 2022;Borowski, 2021;Howard et al, 2020b;Yang et al, 2022). The necessary prerequisites for the creation of a greenhouse are depicted in Fig.…”