Optimal greenhouse lighting scheduling using canopy light distribution model: A simulation study on tomatoes

Abstract

Light is considered the most important environmental factor for greenhouse crops, and lack of lighting limits the productivity of greenhouses. Many studies have focused on improving the energy efficiency of lighting in agriculture. In this study, LED lights were mounted in the top, middle and bottom of the plant canopy to provide additional photosynthetically active radiation. Assuming that 100% of the predicted outdoor radiation is available, the canopy light distribution model was used to determine the relationship between the light energy consumption and the optimal yield. Decision-making on lighting scheduling may be considered as a constrained optimisation, and the status of the LEDs in a period acts as the decision variable. Besides, there are two objective functions: one is the energy consumed by the LED device; the other is the expected yield calculated by the crop model of tomatoes. The optimal solution of the multi-objective optimisation is not unique but corresponds to an infinite number of yield/energy combinations. Farmers can select these combinations according to additional restrictions such as energy efficiency ratio or photoperiod. The yield of our strategy was increased by 12.3% under the constraint of equal energy consumption compared to the greenhouse threshold control strategy. Given the same output as the constraint, the energy consumption was reduced by 30.1%.