Precise Short-Term Small-Area Sunshine Forecasting for Optimal Seedbed Scheduling in Plant Factories

Liang Gong, Fei Huang, Wei Zhang, Yanming Li () and Chengliang Liu
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Liang Gong: School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
Fei Huang: School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
Wei Zhang: School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
Yanming Li: School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
Chengliang Liu: School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China

Agriculture, 2023, vol. 13, issue 9, 1-19

Abstract: Photosynthesis is one of the key issues for vertical cultivation in plant factories, and efficient natural sunlight utilization requires predicting the light falling on each seedbed in a real-time manner. However, public weather services neither provide sunshine data nor meet spatial resolution requirement. Facing these short-term and small-area weather forecasting challenges, we propose a cross-scale approach to infer seedbed-sized areas of sunshine from the city-level public weather services, and then design a seedbed rotation scheduling system for optimal natural sunlight utilization. First, an end-edge-cloud coordinated computing architecture was employed to concurrently aggregate the multi-scale data from weather satellites to sunshine sensors in the plant factory. Second, the small area of sunshine deterministically depends on the meteorological data given a fixed environment, and this correlation was described by a hybrid mapping model, which combined the long short-term memory (LSTM) and gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) algorithms to form the LSTM-GBDT hybrid prediction algorithm (LGHPA). By training the LGHPA with historical local sensory sunshine and the city-scale meteorological data, the hourly sunshine on a seedbed can be predicted from the public weather forecasting service. Finally, a dynamic seedbed scheduling scheme was constructed to provide uniform solar energy absorption according to the one-hour-ahead radiation estimation. Experiment results show that the hourly sunshine prediction error was less than 18.44% over a seasonal period and the deviation for different solar absorption by seedbeds with rotation capability is less than 7.1%. Consequently, it was demonstrated that the application of short-term, small-area sunshine forecasting improved the performance of seedbed rotation for uniformly absorbed solar radiation. The proposed method verifies the feasibility of precisely predicting small-area sunshine down to the seedbed scale by leveraging a model-based approach and a cloud-edge-end merged cybernetic computing paradigm.

Keywords: end-edge-cloud; machine learning; seedbed rotation; optimal scheduling; regional sunshine prediction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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