Optimal Management of Greenhouse Environments

Greenhouse construction and operation have developed considerably during the last decade, mainly in northern European countries. These improvements took place in several areas, such as the development of new building techniques and actuators or the modelling of plant physiological processes and greenhouse climate. Presently, due to economic and environmental requirements, there is still a demand to achieve an optimal management of the greenhouse environment, in order to increase the efficiency of the crop production process. From the greenhouse grower point of view it is intended to maximise the profits, which is a very difficult objective to achieve in practice. This is because growers must make many complex decisions. These decisions are related to the capital investments they have required, the establishment of tactical plans involving the selection of crops, or the use of manual labour, and, a crucial issue, on how to operate the actuating equipments in order to achieve the greenhouse environment dynamical optimisation from an economic return point of view. The purpose of this article is to present methods and software tools for automating an optimal decision process for controlling the greenhouse climate, to illustrate their potential and to point to the problems that remain.