Robust and resilient greenhouse energy management

In Quebec, intense cold and long winters hinder open-field agriculture, making greenhouses a promising alternative for food security. Yet these facilities often rely on rigid energy management and climate control strategies that adapt poorly to weather uncertainty and anomalies.

This doctoral project develops a predictive energy management and climate regulation strategy aimed at preventing energy overconsumption and deviations from the crop's physiological optimum, under contractual constraints and accounting for uncertainty — improving greenhouse energy efficiency while guaranteeing production yield.

Main objective

Develop and validate an energy management and climate control strategy for greenhouses that accounts for uncertainty, to improve energy efficiency and guarantee good production yield.

Methodology

Three stages: modeling of climate dynamics, crop growth and the contractual framework; formulation of a robust, adaptive stochastic predictive control problem within a hierarchical architecture; validation by simulation using historical weather forecasts and measured data.