Design of a Component-based Plant Factory Management Platform

In this study, we introduce convergence technologies of agriculture and IT that allow flexible development of greenhouse management services for different types of plant factory. There are various types of plant factory such as fully artificial light-type, sunlight-type and plastic house, etc. Currently, almost sunlight-type plant factory in Korea uses Priva as environment control system. However, it is expensive, but also difficult for user to change and integrate different sensors and actuators. In addition, most of the typical plant factory control systems have mostly been considered a specific type of plant factory. With this viewpoint, we propose a component-based methodology for providing various types of plant factory with flexible service development and deployment. A component-based platform developed by ETRI applies fully artificial light-type plant factory for monitoring and controlling microclimate of indoor environment. Finally, we develop a small plant factory prototype for a kind of fully artificial light-type plant factory in order to validate component-based service development methodology of plant factory. In the future, we implement sensor and actuators components for greenhouse of sunlight-type. We expect that the proposed service development methodology will be effective service deployment for various types of plant factory. Keywords-plant factory; greenhouse; environment control.