Growth Cycle Management of Crops in Precision Agriculture

Precision agriculture plays an important role in modern agricultural production. Most existing precision agriculture technologies mainly focus on increasing the output of agricultural production [1]. However, the management of crop growth cycle is ignored [2]. The result is that the increase of agricultural yields does not necessarily increase profits, or even causes waste and declines in profits. For example, if multiple farms harvest agricultural products at the same time, it will increase inventory costs of supply chain, and ultimately lead to a decline in sale profits. For another example, the price of some flower products is closely related to the selling date, such as festivals. The price of these flowers will fluctuate much even if the selling date has a delay of only one or two days. Therefore, the time of crop growth is the a basic factor for optimizing agricultural production, and we urgently need a solution to manage the growth cycle of crops. In this project, we aim at controlling the cycle of crop growth in precision agriculture of greenhouses, i.e. produce a required amount of crop products at a required date. We will utilize digital twin [3] and artificial intelligence (AI) [4] to improve the managing granularity of greenhouse from greenhouse-level to crop-level. In this way, we expect that the growth condition of each crop can be monitored and controlled in detail, which could be further utilized for controlling the growth cycle of crops.