Proceedings Of The 4th International Symposium On Models For Plant Growth And Control In Greenhoues Modeling For The 21st Century Agronomic And Greenhouse Crop Models

A discussion of challenges related to the modeling and control of greenhouse crop growth, this book presents state-of-the-art answers to those challenges. The authors model the subsystems involved in successful greenhouse control using different techniques and show how the models obtained can be exploited for simulation or control design; they suggest ideas for the development of physical and/or black-box models for this purpose. Strategies for the control of climate- and irrigation-related variables are brought forward. The uses of PID control and feedforward compensators, both widely used in commercial tools, are summarized. The benefits of advanced control techniques—event-based, robust, and predictive control, for example—are used to improve on the performance of those basic methods. A hierarchical control architecture is developed governed by a high-level multiobjective optimization approach rather than traditional constrained optimization and artificial intelligence techniques. Reference trajectories are found for diurnal and nocturnal temperatures (climate-related setpoints) and electrical conductivity (fertirrigation-related setpoints). The objectives are to maximize profit, fruit quality, and water-use efficiency, these being encouraged by current international rules. Illustrative practical results selected from those obtained in an industrial greenhouse during the last eight years are shown and described. The text of the book is complemented by the use of illustrations, tables and real examples which are helpful in understanding the material. Modeling and Control of Greenhouse Crop Growth will be of interest to industrial engineers, academic researchers and graduates from agricultural, chemical, and process-control backgrounds.

The innovative theme of the International Treatise Series on “Advances in Plant Physiology”, Volume 12 “Physiological and Molecular Interventions for Crop Improvement under Changing Environments” has been especially edited for rational use by planners, scientists, investigators, academicians and postgraduate students. This book is an exceptional assimilation of timely, vital and inclusive twelve worthy reviews of varied significance, especially in view of the changing macro- and micro-climate influencing physiology of plants at all levels, contributed by true commitment of experienced, laudable and well-known scientists/ stalwarts all over the world. This is also strongly realized that there is with time more a need of united effort for the holistic development in the agricultural sciences, which absolutely depends on environmental situations. The threat of changing climate has imposed challenge to world scientists and their efforts in understanding reasons of yield reductions at physiological and molecular levels have been intensified. The consistent outcome are imparted with genetic engineers who have to now under the present circumstances exclusively identify, isolate and purify specific genes from DNA sequences befitting for development of tolerance mechanism in crop plants under changes of different degrees of intensity in environment. That is naturally the step wise long process having several pros and cons to arrive at any conclusion. Hence, the treatise series is the need of the hour and excellent source to disseminate meaningful distilled thoughts emerging out of extensive research which has due relevance for planning consequential basic strategic research besides direct help to the mankind. The intricacies of abiotic and biotic stresses on growth and development of plants have been understood in the last few decades. This book too is an endeavour to make aware the young workers to gain information on researches of basic and applied significance for extending consequential research of physiological and molecular approaches for crop improvement under changing environment. The manifold ideas on basic problems of the present and the future as well as resolutions, in part, have been consolidated which will be accomplished in subsequent volumes.