Technological progresses in modern sustainable greenhouses cultivation as the path towards precision agriculture

Abstract Greenhouse technology is an opportune tool for increasing crop yields through the accurate adjustment of internal climate growth conditions such as temperature, humidity, light intensity and CO2 concentration. The aim of this paper is to present an overview of the most recent technological advances in modern greenhouses, and highlights their application in hardware design, environmental monitoring, dynamics modeling, microclimate control, energy optimization, green energy integration and storage systems implementation. The main objectives can be summarized in presenting sufficient contributions to the new body of knowledge and gathering the recent greenhouse progress in order to support greenhouse engineers, researchers and industrials to achieve higher yields at minimum possible cost. The results reveal that the work carried out over the last 5 years has shown that research and development projects have lent a lot of interest in favor of the greenhouse crops sector. From structural hardware point of view, the choice of an agricultural greenhouse design to meet the economic conditions of greenhouse growers always remains a challenge for the designer. The results report that research concentration has moved from classical controllers to modern ones based on the environment explicit perception. Investigations report that renewable energies such as solar and geothermal became widely used as an environmentally friendly solution and have proven to make greenhouses not only energy self-sufficient but also allow the energy exchange with the electric grid.