Crop Scheduling for Plant Factory to Increase Productivity

A plant factory is a crop production facility in which all the environmental elements such as temperature, humidity, lighting, and nutrition for plant growth are artificially controlled. The operating cost of plant factories is usually high due to intensive energy consumption. It is crucial to choose appropriate crops for cultivation at proper time for revenue maximization. In this research, we propose a crop scheduling approach for plant factories. The proposed approach considers several factors which impacts the revenue of running plant factory, such as crop price fluctuation, crop contracting supply between plant factories and retailers, and operating setup for crop cultivation. The crop scheduling is formulated as a mixed integer programming problem and is solved using branch-and-bound algorithms. The proposed approach can be incorporated into any plant factory to increase its production and revenue.