Precision lighting for controlled closed urban horticultural environments with emphasis on the use of LED technology

The increasing global need for food in expanded cities, the growing consumer awareness of the environmental impact of food systems, as well as the undeniable relationships of the environment of rapid urbanized areas to aesthetic, architectural, recreational and psychological aspects of the human nature, render urban horticulture and floriculture, in general, and in particular that performed in controlled closed environments a very challenging and promising area of research and application. As reported by many researchers, the artificial lighting in the closed controlled horticultural environments can have positive effect on the cultivations' growth periods and on the quality of harvested products. The expanding technology of solid-state lighting, based on the light-emitted diodes (LEDs) has already caught the interest of horticulture research community. Nevertheless, the existing lighting systems appear to be rather inflexible to support horticultural research requirements. At the same time, the particular needs of the controlled closed urban horticulture impose additional spatiotemporal and functional requirement to a lighting system. They are originally designed for established horticultural applications in big-sized traditional greenhouses. This study aims to highlight that a lighting system has to satisfy the increasing needs for precision lighting in modern urban horticulture. Furthermore, it proposes a novel architecture for the precision lighting systems with special care to the clustering and to the networking functions together with the easiness of deployment.