The region around Almería, Spain, has the largest concentration of greenhouses in the world. Covering more 33,000 hectares, the greenhouses produce enough fruits and vegetables each year to meet about half of European demand. To help researchers and farmers optimize greenhouse production and profitability, a team of Universidad de Almería (UAL) researchers created greenhouse models as a service (GMaaS). The GMaaS system is part of the EU-funded Internet of Food & Farm project, which aims to increase yields of better-quality produce with Internet of Things (IoT) technologies.
UAL’s models, developed in MATLAB® and deployed in the cloud with MATLAB Production Server™, combine data from IoT sensors with market and weather data to enable simulation of greenhouse processes and automated control of temperature, irrigation volume, irrigation times, and other key variables.
“MATLAB made it easy to translate equations and ideas into code,” says José Luis Guzmán Sánchez, professor at Universidad de Almería. “After we had developed our models, MATLAB Production Server enabled us to make all of them accessible via the cloud without recoding them in another language, saving months of development effort.”