Chapter 5.3 - IT Networks and Plant Factories

Abstract

As the future direction of agricultural productions, the plant factory has many advantages, such as high-tech content, high resource utilization, high output, and high quality. It has become a research hotspot in the industry internet field. With the scale expansion of the plant factories, their intelligent management and automation increasingly rely on the support of modern information technology (IT). This article introduces the function and role of five subsystems of the plant factory, including the data acquisition and control signal drive, computer networks, data processing, process control, and human-computer interaction (HCI), and also compares the characteristic of the strong coupling IT network architecture with the generalized one; analyzes the data communication and data preprocessing mechanism of plant factory gateway devices when connecting the sensors and controlled devices with different protocols; describes the multi-control loop structure of the plant factory automation control system based on the IAP universal control platform and analyzes the importance of the dynamic online optimization approach for the multi-loop control; introduces the human-computer interactive software environment of plant factories from the system definition, human-machine interface, and algorithm design; and presents the practical application methods of these three kinds of software with the example of plant growth light intensity setting and monitoring. Finally, this paper proposes the concept and architecture design of the cloud plant factory and discusses the difference of the computing environment and the internet applications between the traditional IT systems and the cloud IT systems. At the same time, this paper also analyzes the future trends and challenges of cloud plant factories.