Digital twins for vertical farming

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Food autonomy is an importnt concern in Quebec and Canada. At the same time, the population of Canada has been steadily increasing by over 300,000 per annum since 1960. Inappropriate food autonomy poses serious threats to the sustainable development of Canada and, as a consequence, of Quebec. In Quebec, the main challenge to achieve sustainable food autonomy is the four-season climate that prevents year-round open-air farming. Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA), chiefly associated with Vertical Farming, offers a sustainable solution to cope with the concerns and challenges of local food production. CEA archives this by a resource and cost efficient solution to produce vegetables and fruits in a closed and controlled environment, using artificial lighting and managed environmental conditions. Ferme d'Hiver is a leading Quebec-based company targeting the production of off-season, high-nutrition fruits and vegetables in an environmentally controlled growth environment, without the use of chemical pesticides. Ferme d'Hiver aims at optimizing the yield and the energy consumption of its operations by integrating various cutting-edge technologies to automate its production system and by recovering the heat produced by the vertical farming lights to heat adjacent greenhouses. The goal of this project is to investigate the feasibility of applying Digital Shadows for modeling the behavior of living organisms for the analysis and control of their lifecycle. Digital Shadows allow the simulation of the production cycle and the exploration of various scenarios for the optimization of the production system. Although already applied in conjunction with cyber-physical systems, the use of digital shadows for biological organisms such as plants remains a challenge. Therefore, this project provides means for developing Digital Shadows of systems featuring biological organisms by extending the definition of the physical asset.