An Agent-based Extensible Climate Control System for Sustainable Greenhouse Production

摘要

The slow adoption pace of new control strategies for sustainable greenhouse climate control by industrial growers is mainly due to the complexity of identifying and resolving potentially conflicting climate control requirements. In this paper, we present a multi-agent-based climate control system that allows new requirements to be added without any need to identify or resolve conflicts beforehand. This is achieved by representing the climate control requirements as separate agents. Identifying and solving conflicts now become a negotiation problem among agents sharing the same controlled environment. Negotiation is done using a novel multi-issue negotiation protocol that uses a generic algorithm to find an optimized solution within the search space. The Multi-Agent control system has been empirically evaluated in an ornamental floriculture research facility in Denmark. The evaluation showed that it is realistic to implement the climate control requirements as individual agents, thereby opening greenhouse climate control systems for integration of independently produced control strategies.