Setting up a Digital Twin Assisted Greenhouse Architecture

Abstract

The present article contains a study about utilizing the Digital Twins concept in the field of contemporary agricultural production. Through this study, an exemplary architecture has been developed regarding the conversion of a conventional greenhouse to a digital greenhouse. A digital greenhouse modus operandi features a great number of advantages compared with the traditional workflow in a conventional greenhouse. The purpose of the work is to propose tools for assisting the possible reduction of the consumption of the used resources for the crops. This requires the application of automation of tools for cultivation such as Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA). The article shows that the Digital Twins concept can immensely contribute towards controlling the agricultural environment and at the same time improve performance and quality while reducing the consumption of resources for a variety of crops. The proposed workflow starts by identifying the parameters that need to be taken into account and finally proposes several cyber and physical tools for setting up a Digital Twin for the case of a greenhouse. The objective of this study was the development of a DT architecture that would be able to optimize productivity in the context of CEA applications.