Event-based control and wireless sensor network for greenhouse diurnal temperature control: A simulated case study

Abstract

Traditionally, greenhouse installations have required a great effort to connect and distribute all the sensors and data acquisition systems. These installations need many data and power wires to be distributed along the green-houses making the system complex and expensive. For this reason, and others such as unavailability of distributed actuators, only individual sensors are usually located in a fixed point of the greenhouse selected as representative of greenhouse dynamics. On the other hand, the actuation system in greenhouses are usually composed by mechanical devices controlled using relays, being desirable to reduce the number of commutations of the control signal from security and economical point of views. The greenhouse climate control can be represented as an event-based system, where low-frequency dynamics variables have to be controlled and this control usually acts against events governed by external disturbances. Therefore, this work presents preliminary ideas and results of wireless sensor network and event-based control applied to the greenhouse climate control problem.