A Cascaded Economic Model Predictive Control Approach to Greenhouse Climate Control

This paper introduces a cascaded climate control framework in which a primary economic model predictive controller (EMPC) determines climate bounds for a secondary rule-based controller, based on industrial practice. The proposed controller may therefore serve as a blueprint for control design for existing greenhouse climate control systems while retaining the reliability and safety of legacy systems. The framework's performance is evaluated through simulations of a lettuce greenhouse model and compared against a state-of-the-art EMPC that controls all actuators directly. The results show that the proposed approach achieves comparable performance to the ideal state-of-the-art EMPC, demonstrating negligible performance loss from retaining rule-based control in the climate control system.