Data-driven building and growing in the greenhouse sector

Thema:
Greenhouses

TNO is working to further develop digital growing using big data and ICT. Digital growing is the future of innovation in the greenhouse horticulture sector and goes beyond simply building a greenhouse: by offering support in cultivation and business management, suppliers of greenhouses can guarantee cultivation performance.

Digital infrastructure for greenhouse horticulture

Working with the Hortivation foundation, TNO has set the global standard for digital infrastructure for greenhouse horticulture. The basis for this is a common language, the Common Greenhouse Ontology. In addition, together we’ve developed the Hortivation Hub – a kind of global connector for the safe and easy exchange of data between parties.

Based on this infrastructure, TNO develops new applications in the field of data-driven building of greenhouses and data-driven growing. This enables greenhouse suppliers to provide new services, such as guarantees of cultivation performance.

TNO and Hortivation’s data infrastructure enables companies and technical installations to work together on a plug-and-play basis. With a standard language, so as to exchange data without misunderstandings. This video explains how.

Data-driven building

The Data-Driven Building programme is aimed at improving greenhouse design and making it more sustainable. In this programme, products are developed that give greenhouse constructors and other suppliers the tools and data to monitor the performance of their products and improve it in a targeted way. An example of this is the Greenhouse Information System. It enables suppliers to exchange design specifications, so as to accelerate the design process and reduce the likelihood of miscommunication.

Egon Janssen from TNO, Richard van der Sande from Certhon, Ad de Koning from Ridder, Jeroen Sanders from Vertify, and Annie van de Riet from Hortivation explain in the video below how the Hortivation Hub works and is received.

Data-driven growing

Autonomous cultivation means both predictive ability and real-time cooperation between systems and installations. The Data-Driven Growing programme is aimed at accelerating developments in the area of autonomous growing.

As part of this, TNO is developing GAIA. Autonomous greenhouse systems sometimes generate conflicting control settings. Thanks to GAIA, these control settings are aligned with each other in real time, so that these smart systems work together seamlessly, rather than against each other.