Optimal Supplemental Lighting Control Using LED Lamps in Greenhouses Considering Multicrops and Spatial Supplemental Light Distribution

Abstract

This brief aims at developing an optimal supplemental lighting control method using light-emitting diode (LED) lamps in controlled environmental agriculture. Existing results in the literature have not contemplated the problem under supplemental light distribution and/or multicrops in greenhouses where “supplemental light distribution” is referred to the horizontal pattern it casts and amount of light that reaches certain vertical angles and “multicrops” is defined as cultivating different plants in a greenhouse. To the best knowledge of the authors, this work is the first that fills the aforementioned gap. To address the problem, an approach for sectioning LED lamps’ control sources in a greenhouse is proposed, and an optimization problem is formulated for minimizing the electricity cost, light intensity regulation, and/or peak of supplemental lights minimization under both supplemental light distribution and multicrops cases for which a learning-based algorithm is given under sunlight prediction (which is based on the Markov process). A switched algorithm is then proposed to reduce electricity cost to the lowest possible. Finally, a numerical example is provided in order to demonstrate the result and its advantages.