Implementation of Control and Management System for Plant Factory Using ZigBee WSN

Abstract

In the recent years, intelligent systems for agricultural production are being developed for safe food production keeping into consideration the low production and system costs. Along with stable food production, Plant Factories provide higher productivity by growing multiple crops and make efficient use of land and resources. Time to harvest can be reduced and controlled by employing an automated control and management system in a Plant Factory in which growing conditions i.e. humidity, temperature, CO2 concentration and light intensity and frequency are maintained which facilitate plant growth. For proper management, data acquisition from the field and its transfer to a central control system is required and different communication systems, mostly wired, have been employed. In this thesis, a hybrid control system for a Smart light emitting diode (LED) based Plant Factory consisting of ZigBee wireless mesh network and a special serial communication protocol for the control of Smart LED lighting system is implemented. It also describes an efficient control and management system for a Plant Factory. This system aims to achieve very important goals: firstly it is an energy efficient system taking into consideration the power management of the lighting system through dimming control by getting luminescence feedback from light intensity & color value sensors installed on field and also the control system is implemented using ZigBee; a low rate personal area network (LR-PAN) and open global standard, known for its energy efficiency, low power consumption and long network life. In order to measure power consumption at any time, metering nodes are also installed and to ensure the stability of the network equipment, temperature sensors are also installed on LED driver board. Another important thing done to achieve an economical solution is use of LED lighting instead of traditional fluorescent light which not only reduces power consumption but also increases operation life of lighting network. The communication system is implemented using ZigBee mesh network based sensor dimming and metering nodes, offering real time monitoring of physical conditions of Plant Factory and real time control of the lighting system. Mesh network exploits any possible communication path to reach the destination by hopping data from node to node allowing much higher network capacity in terms of number of nodes. A gateway node has also been developed that provides interoperability between TCP/IP network and ZigBee Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). This interoperability makes it possible for the remote user to monitor and control the Plant Factory operation. Smart LED lighting system is an efficient and economical system that facilitates plant growth by varying light intensity and frequency according to light conditions and system requirements and it helps reducing production costs. The user interacts with this control system of Smart LED based Plant Factory using a transparent and simple Graphical User Interface(GUI) accessible from remote places.