Development and simulation of an agriculture control system using fuzzy logic method and Visual Basic environment

Abstract

Agriculture can be broadly grouped into farming, crop and food plants. Some very fundamental factors that can effects both the growth of the plants and the quality that is produced include the temperature of the grow room, relative humidity and the light intensity that they received. Light intensity influences the manufacture of plant food, stem length, leaf color and flowering. Too much light intensity can cause the plants stunning and increase the temperature within the grow room which may lead to an increase respiration of the plants above the rate of photosynthesis. The aim of this project is to design and develop an agriculture control system to provide and maintain an adequate and appropriate lighting intensity and temperature. The lighting intensity produce by the lighting system will adjusted automatically in response to the changing in temperature, humidity and illumination within the area of crop. In order to give an efficient control on lighting intensity, a fuzzy expert system was design with a graphical user interface (GUI) in Visual Basic environment. A fuzzy expert system is developed to recognize the changes in temperature, humidity and illumination within the plants area and determine the level of lighting intensity. This will be done by a sensor that capture the value of the variable and send through a USB to UART converter to convert the decimal value to ASCII code so that the fuzzy expert system can determine an adequate and permissible level of lighting intensity. The graphical user interface (GUI) for this project is design to show the actual value of the temperature, humidity and illumination within the grow room and visualize an animation of the output which is the lighting intensity and water pump. Visual Basic software is used to perform the simulation of the fuzzy expert system and a prototype of agriculture control room is developed to interface and demonstrate the working process of the system.