Project - Greenhouse Industry 4.0

EUDP Project: Greenhouse Industry 4.0 helps to ensure that Danish greenhouse manufacturers and technology suppliers can take advantage of the opportunities offered by new digital solutions. It builds on several years of energy research with the aim of delivering a digital solution that ensures even greater Danish exports of both technology and plants as well as resource optimal production in the future

Project start October 2018. Project end September 2022.

This project aims to secure a position for the Danish horticultural greenhouse Industry as the world leader in energy efficient and environmentally sustainable production.

The project will achieve the aim by making the Danish greenhouse growers world-leading digital frontrunners by adopting and combining the Industry 4.0 technologies; IoT, AI, Big Data, cloud computing, and Digital Twins as integrated parts of their production systems. The project hereby contributes to transform the Danish greenhouse growers from practitioners of current best-practice to early adopters of next-practice. Like other energy and labor-intensive industries that compete with low-cost regions, the Danish horticultural greenhouse industry must continuously improve the energy efficiency and production throughput and productivity, without compromising product quality or sustainability, to stay competitive. This competitive pressure calls for a new disruptive approach for vertical integration and optimization of the greenhouse production processes. By making a leap forward, utilizing the Industry 4.0 concept of Digital Twins to address the global competitive challenge, the Danish horticultural greenhouse industry will hold its position, and stay ahead of low-cost regions in the world, who are currently investing in their low-tech greenhouse sector to gain access to the global multi-billion market for horticultural products.

Application of the Industry 4.0 Digital Twin concept to the Danish horticulture greenhouse industry comprises the use of digital models to simulate and evaluate the performance of the physical greenhouse facility and the production processes. A Digital Twin combines modelling, AI and Big Data analytics with IoT and traditional sensor data from the production and cloud-based enterprise data to predict how the physical twin will perform under different operation conditions. Deploying the Digital Twin concept support co-optimization of the production schedule, energy consumption, and labour cost, by considering influential factors including production deadlines, quality grading, heating, artificial lighting, energy prices (gas and electricity), and weather forecasts.

Project Aims

• The outcome of the project is a Greenhouse Industry 4.0 Digital Twin software platform that will be deployed and demonstrated at the participating greenhouse growers.
• The Greenhouse Industry 4.0 Digital Twin software platform will be made available, nationally and internationally, to other greenhouse growers on commercial terms.

Partners

• Danish Technological Institute
• University of Southern Denmark
• Aarhus University, Food
• Århus University, Agroecology
• Hjortebjerg
• ByGrowers
• Knud Jepsen A/S
• Danish Horticulture
• NB Data
• Senmatic A/S
• Danish Cleantech Hub
• Energi Danmark

Read more

• Data Architecture for Digital Twin of Commercial Greenhouse Production
• Digital Twin Framework for Energy Efficient Greenhouse Industry 4.0