4th Workshop on Management for Industry 5.0 (MFI5.
0 2023) - Workshop of NOMS 2023
Enabling Scalable Smart Vertical Farming with IoT
and Machine Learning Technologies
NOMS 2023-2023 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium | 978-1-6654-7716-1/23/$31.00 ©2023 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/NOMS56928.2023.10154269
Csaba Hegedűs, Attila Frankó, Pál Varga
Dept. of Telecommunications and Media Informatics
Budapest University of Technology and Economics
2 Magyar Tudósok krt., Budapest, Hungary, H-1117
Email: {hegedus, franko, pvarga}@tmit.bme.hu
Abstract—Current state of the art in vertical farming faces
numerous challenges around optimisation and efficiency. This
new domain of agriculture is targeting high level of automated
and autonomous operations, which require advanced sensing and
actuating capabilities with new types of process control. Although
while several commercial solutions are already available, these
only satisfy parts of the requirements, not enabling the desired
level of autonomy and self-learning capabilities. To this end, this
position paper examines state of the art and scopes the work
on how to create and integrate Internet of Things and Machine
Learning technologies to optimise the active ingredient output
while growing medicinal plants in scalable vertical farming grow
boxes.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Food security is a global challenge and is impacted by
rapidly compounding effects of – among others – climate
change, population trends and supply chain shortcomings.
Meanwhile, current state of the art in agriculture still faces
numerous challenges in sustainability, labour intensity and
energy efficiency requirements, due to the low automation level
and scalability of solutions.
There is definitely a strong need in these industries for
the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) or Machine Learning
(ML) technologies, however, the initial investment and process
changes are immense to start this journey [1]. Moreover,
the efforts required are even higher for newer domains of
agriculture, such as vertical farming and modern green housing
use cases, as the maturity of these domains themselves is fast
evolving.
The goal of our work in the AGRARSENSE project – a
Key Digital Technologies Joint Undertaking (KDT-JU) initia-
tive by the European Commission (EC) with over 55 partners
in the consortium – is to develop sensor and decision-support
technologies and enablers for a smart farming use case.
This position paper focuses on vertical farming of medici-
nal plants use cases, and how IoT and ML can be applied to the
vertical farming and smart greenhouses agricultural domain,
focusing on optimising the yield of the active ingredients
in medicinal plants. Therefore, this paper is sectioned as
follows. Chapter II discusses the exact use case of growing
medicinal plants in vertical farming, while collecting require-
ments. Chapter III reviews the current state of the art (SoA)
in the agriculture and forestry domain around automation
and decision-support systems perspective. Finally, Chapter IV
Authorized licensed use limited to: AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM AMRITA SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING. Downloaded on April 04,2024 at 07:09:59 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
Stefan Gindl, Markus Tauber
Research Studios Austria Forschungsgesellschaft mbH
Leopoldskronstraße 30, 5020 Salzburg, Austria
Email: {stefan.gind,markus.tauber}@researchstudio.at
outlines active research topics and issues to tackle in our work
in the project in terms of creating intelligent and scalable
process control ecosystems for the given use case.
II. V ERTICAL FARMING
Vertical farming is the practice of growing crops or any
plants in vertically stacked layers. It incorporates controlled
environment agriculture practices, which aim to optimise plant
growth, and soil-less farming techniques such as hydroponics,
aquaponics, and aeroponics [2]. The area of high-tech green-
houses is expected to grow from approximately 50,000 hectare
now to 80,000 hectare in 2026. At the same time, greenhouse
horticulture is very labour-intensive, typically requiring 7,500
hours of labour per hectare per year [3]. The potential total
market value for robotics in greenhouses is estimated between
50 - 75 billion Euros [4].
Vertical farming enables plants to be grown and harvested
throughout the entire year under fully controlled artificial envi-
ronments on several levels. A vertical farm can be set up even
inside or near a city (i.e. urban farming), e.g., to reuse vacant
buildings (i.e. factories), since these farming environments can
be created indoors without major investments in re-purposing
the building. Energy efficiency increases further, if the vertical
farming sites are operated with photovoltaic energy sources,
or employ CO2 converters or industrial heat pumps.
While, the main advantage of utilising vertical farming
technologies is the increased yield that comes with a smaller
unit area of land requirement, the goods produced also can
have the highest product quality and output due to optimised
micro-climate and conditions maintained. However, it is worth
noting that energy consumption is considered still too high in
practice to produce ”low price” plants with vertical farming,
therefore the first adopter industry players are going for
quality-critical plants as the primary business case. One of
the more intricate applications of vertical farming is hence
to produce high quality medicinal plants that are processed
into food supplements. The main target here is an optimisa-
tion of active ingredients in the plants, for example Bacopa
monnieri (Brahmi), Centella asiatica (Gotu Kola) or (in our
case) Cannabis sst. spontanea (CBD-Hanf). These plants can
highly suffer from contamination with environmental toxins,
hence fertiliser residues are reduced to a minimum.
 4th Workshop on Management for Industry 5.0 (MFI5.0 2023) - Workshop of NOMS 2023
A. State of Industry in Vertical Farming
The current state of the art in vertical farming is aimed at
these activities, but not (yet) in a mature way, leaving a lot
of research topics wide open. There are several vertical farm
equipment producer startups (e.g. Urban Crop Solution [5]
or Infarm [6]) or companies who build up their own vertical
farm to produce plants. They are mainly specialised on food
production for given plants (like salad, cabbage, spinach). Such
facilities work with special production equipment optimised
and build up for this use only [1].
The main cost drivers in a vertical farm are (i) the energy
used by grow-light and (ii) the maintenance of a stable and
optimised micro-climate for plants (i.e. temperature, irriga-
tion, etc). These vertical farms are focused cyber-physical
production systems (CPPS) that optimise mass production with
automatic harvesting (fully automatic production facilities).
There are numerous disadvantages or shortcomings of these
solutions, these include, among others:
• Energy consumption is still very high to make deploy-
ments profitable
• No flexibility to change the flora post-deployment
• No optimisation possibility for active ingredients in
plants
• Sites are usually one-time deployed, not scaling dy-
namically
• High technology and know-how import dependency
from outside the European Union
As a consequence, there are two key enablers needed for
vertical farming to grow from its current state. It is essential
to counteract the rising energy prices and labour costs to
maintain vertical farm sites by (i) focusing on high value-added
plants, which, however, require (ii) more advanced data-driven,
autonomous and yield-optimising control mechanisms to be
developed. Moreover, (iii) European technology and research
providers are also required to establish self-sufficient value
chains, as the know-how in IoT and ML technology adaptation
to industrial use cases are lacking on the continent.
B. Requirements for New Technology Adoption
In our use case, the partitioning of a vertical farm into
several smaller grow boxes aims to (i) isolate plants with
diseases (plant production safety) and helps to (ii) achieve a
scalable, multi-tenant ecosystem. The solution must monitor
and regulate growth factors (i.e. light, water, humidity, min-
erals or number of bacteria) per grow box. The waste output
from one grow box also needs to be routed and reused in other
grow boxes nourishing different plants and grow conditions
(e.g. heat, water, fertiliser or CO2). The requirements of the
medicinal plant production vertical farming use case entails,
among others:
1) Reduce the fertiliser and water usage together with
CO2 gas emissions
2) Increase irrigation & water reservoir automation
3) Reduce growing process losses
4) Increase grow box energy optimisation (e.g. optimize
grow light power and spectral composition)
5) Create sensing capability for the whole plant lifecycle
Authorized licensed use limited to: AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM AMRITA SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING. Downloaded on April 04,2024 at 07:09:59 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
6) Improve disease and pest detection, reduce pesticide
usage to zero
7) Improve yield forecasting and quality assessment
These domain requirements can be translated into the
controllability, observability and scalability requirements to-
wards the IoT architecture and process control algorithms. The
complex solution must provide, among others:
1) Operational observability of each grow boxes, growth
cycles with digital twins
2) Multi-modal sensor data collection and aggregation
capability (e.g. light, temperature, humidity, soil or
water-cycle analysis)
3) Multi-dimensional, autonomous actuating capability
per grow-box
4) Energy and resource flow optimisation between grow
boxes in individual deployments
5) Smart lighting panel prototype and spectral analysis
tools for hydroponics
6) Process support for tracking yield output parameters
of individual growth cycles across deployments
7) Multi-tenant, scalable data aggregation and analytics
capability across production deployments
III. S TATE OF THE A RT IN S MART AGRICULTURE
Machine Learning (ML), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
(UAV), Internet of Things (IoT) and Cloud Computing are
the major enablers of smart agricultural applications, which
address traditional challenges in agriculture such as: increasing
yields, ensuring the quality of crops, enhancing sustainability
and optimising resource utilisation [7], [8].
A. Vertical farming as System-of-Systems
It is often useful to think about these solutions as Cyber-
Physical System of Systems (CPSoS), as they usually consist
of multiple complex and somewhat autonomous applications
to achieve their goals. In [9], authors proposed the idea of
Internet-of-Agro-Things based Agro-Cyber-Physical Systems
for general purposes and also provide an actual complete use-
case for this approach. Meanwhile, authors of [10] designed
and implemented an experimental, modular, vertical farming
ecosystem, where modularity of the components was achieved
by using the service oriented architecture patterns. In this
SoS, hardware and software components are loosely coupled
in order to support the modularity of the solution to create
a plug-and-play platform for private or small business indoor
farming system.
B. Sensing and monitoring capabilities
In agriculture and horticulture, the key factors are com-
mon for all plants, such as light, water and nutrients, while
individual plants might require measuring new ones as well.
Therefore, there are special sensors and monitoring devices
besides the standard ones. Based on surveys [11] and [12]
these sensing platforms can be classified by two dimensions:
the purpose of the monitoring and types of sensors used. It is
worth to mention that while asset tracking and localisation
purposes are also very common in smart agriculture, these
are outside of the scope of indoor vertical farming. According
 4th Workshop on Management for Industry 5.0 (MFI5.0 2023) - Workshop of NOMS 2023

to [11] the main classes, i.e. typical applications for sensors

are the monitoring of crops (e.g. growth or canopy), substrate MONITOR
(e.g. soil composition, pH or moisture) and environment (e.g.
air, radiation or wind), each class having its own goals.
Authors of [12] provide another classification based on
the applied sensors types, e.g. acoustic, airflow-based, electro- SHARED
ANALYSE EXECUTE
chemical, electromagnetic, etc. These classifications highlight KNOWLEDGE
the fact that vertical farming applications can utilise a wide
variety of sensor technologies. However, their primary setups
are usually very similar in nature, i.e. the generic patterns are
so widespread that authors of [13] showed the capability to MAPE-K
drive most of the applications within an automated homestead PLAN
with a unified hardware stack.
Controllers
C. Artificial intelligence in smart agriculture
Since the main goals of smart agricultural systems always
involve data-driven control and optimisation, artificial intelli-
gence plays a significant role in this field. In [14], six areas are
identified as key targets of application, namely: crop yield and
price prediction, intelligent spraying, autonomous agriculture Sensors
robots, predictive insights, crop and soil monitoring, and crop
disease diagnosis.
Authors of [14] proposed a solution that utilises artificial
neural networks (ANN) and genetic algorithms (GA) for crop Edge
estimation and prediction, differentiate between the wheat device
crops from the other unwanted plants. In [15], the authors also
apply ANNs, but with Adaptive Particle Swarm Optimisation
for sustainable, smart olive cultivation.
Cloud
The applied technologies in this case vary on a large scale,
according to [14]. The most prevalent ones are feed-forward MONITOR

and convolutional neural networks, since most applications

require computer vision (CV) and pattern recognition,e.g. [9]. ANALYSE
SHARED
KNOWLEDGE
EXECUTE

Decision trees and support vector machines are also regularly PLAN

used for classification and regression analysis, as the most

commonly used supervised techniques [16]. MONITOR

SHARED
Growing
boxes
ANALYSE EXECUTE
KNOWLEDGE

IV. S COPE OF W ORK AND C ONCLUSIONS PLAN

As seen above, there is a wide range of technical literature MONITOR

and industrial best practices available for smart farming use SHARED
ANALYSE EXECUTE

cases. However, there are several active research topics iden- KNOWLEDGE

tified that need to be adressed in AGRARSENSE. The unique PLAN

business model (i.e. standalone grow boxes sold to end users)

and the targeted flora (medicinal plants with active ingredients)
described in Chapter II require a scalable and well-defined IoT
framework that enables the continuous development of control
algorithms.
A. Building the IoT Framework
Each grow box is a standalone system that needs to
function autonomously, while benefit from a federated learning
ecosystem. All grow boxes need to be able to collect multi-
modal sensor data and actuate on their own, while potentially
enabling information exchange with nearby grow boxes to
optimise deployment level energy consumption. This architec-
ture will build on top of previous works of the authors [17],
[18] and will examine the possibilities of using service-
oriented approach (building a CPSoS) with Monitor-Analyze-
Plan-Execute over a Knowledge base (MAPE-K) [19] based
Fig. 1. Vertical farming grow boxes as CPSoS
control loops. The overview of the proposed solution can be
found in Fig. 1.
Moreover, each grow box needs to handle relatively large
quantities of data, as each growth cycle needs to be observed,
while the yield output values (i.e. active ingredient content
and overall crop canopy) must be traced as well. This requires
advanced data management capabilities in the IoT nodes, since
visual and tabular data sources from sensors and actuators
will result in terabyte range data produced locally, on a 3-
4 month timeframe. Naturally, the autonomous solution must
also be validated against the IT security and operational
safety requirements, which will be executed based on previous
works [20].

Authorized licensed use limited to: AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM AMRITA SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING. Downloaded on April 04,2024 at 07:09:59 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 4th Workshop on Management for Industry 5.0 (MFI5.0 2023) - Workshop of NOMS 2023
While the grow boxes themselves might be deployed and
operated by various customers, there is a need for a platform
solution that can aggregate operational data from grow boxes
securely to enable centralized machine learning efforts (i.e.
providing good quality raw data for ML algorithms). Such a
platform must take into account the business model and various
security requirements, and enable multi-tenancy, as also shown
in Fig. 1. Therefore, the relevant questions around the IoT
platform design are to be examined in this project:
• Cloud-central or converged fog computing paradigms
• Edge computing device and communications capabil-
ities for grow boxes
• Autonomous management algorithms for grow boxes
• Distributed or federated learning capabilities in a
multi-tenant platform solution
• Digital Twin capabilities
• Scalability of relevant architecture patterns
• IoT security evaluation of the developed Cyber-
Physical Production System (CPPS)
B. Establishing ML Practice
The MAPE-K control loops will leverage machine learning
to analyse and plan required steps. As mentioned before,
various methods have been applied successfully, including
neural networks, decision trees, or support vector machines. In
our case, machine learning will be used in a synergy between
reinforcement learning and active learning.
Reinforcement learning is a machine learning paradigm
that does not require the availability of training data. In-
stead, an agent, in our case the ML-driven MAPE-K cycle
learns based on an reward function. Such approaches have
been successfully used in precision farming, e.g., to draw
the attention of agricultural robots to specific regions on
the farm [21]. Given a set of desirable parameters, e.g., the
ideal size of plant blossom or yield per unit of space, the
system will learn to set ideal conditions of the farm by itself
in this scenario. We plan to implement a SARSA approach
(State–action–reward–state–action), which uses a set of so-
called policies to guide the behaviour of the learning system.
The policies are serialised in the ”Knowledge” component of
the MAPE-K control loop. However, this approach is error-
prone and would imply high potential of failure especially
during the beginning of learning. Therefore, active learning
will help to mitigate the risk. Unseen/unknown conditions can
be forward to human experts for judgement and to collect
further training data. The overall goal is to establish a system
that can regulate the conditions in the farm and operate it fully
autonomously.
C. Conclusions
This position paper is scoping the work for the AgrarSense
project. It presented the current state of the art in vertical
farming and agriculture automation, and detailed the use case
requirements for growing medicinal plants in vertical farming
grow boxes in the AGRARSENSE project. Afterwards, it
detailed the research work ahead, which revolve around (i)
building and evaluating an IoT platform and (ii) establishing
practices continuous data collection to enable machine learning
applications.
Authorized licensed use limited to: AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM AMRITA SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING. Downloaded on April 04,2024 at 07:09:59 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research was funded by the European Commission
and the Austrian Authorities through the AgrarSense project
(EU grant agreement No. 334013).
R EFERENCES
[1] R. Birner, T. Daum, and C. Pray, “Who drives the digital revolution
in agriculture? a review of supply-side trends, players and challenges,”
Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, vol. 43, no. 4, pp. 1260–
1285, 2021.
[2] USA National Center for Appropriate Technology, “Vertical farming,”
https://attra.ncat.org/publication/vertical-farming/, 12 2022.
[3] Bloomberg, “Smart agriculture market size worth $35.98 billion by
2030: Grand view research, inc.” https://www.bloomberg.com/pres
s-releases/2022-04-21/smart-agriculture-market-size-worth-35-98-billi
on-by-2030-grand-view-research-incy, 04 2022.
[4] Markets & Markets, “Smart agriculture market by offering, agriculture
type,” https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/smart-agr
iculture-market-239736790.html, 10 2021.
[5] Urban Crop Solutions, “Growth solutions,” https://urbancropsolutions
.com, 12 2022.
[6] InFarm, “Company website,” https://www.infarm.com, 12 2022.
[7] “Survey for smart farming technologies: Challenges and issues,” Com-
puters & Electrical Engineering, vol. 92, p. 107104, 2021.
[8] “Review of agricultural iot technology,” Artificial Intelligence in Agri-
culture, vol. 6, pp. 10–22, 2022.
[9] V. Udutalapally, S. P. Mohanty, V. Pallagani, and V. Khandelwal, “scrop:
A novel device for sustainable automatic disease prediction, crop
selection, and irrigation in internet-of-agro-things for smart agriculture,”
IEEE Sensors Journal, vol. 21, no. 16, pp. 17 525–17 538, 2021.
[10] I. Haris, A. Fasching, L. Punzenberger, and R. Grosu, “Cps/iot ecosys-
tem: Indoor vertical farming system,” in 2019 IEEE 23rd International
Symposium on Consumer Technologies (ISCT), 2019, pp. 47–52.
[11] C. Maraveas and T. Bartzanas, “Application of internet of things (iot)
for optimized greenhouse environments,” AgriEngineering, vol. 3, no. 4,
pp. 954–970, 2021.
[12] M. Dhanaraju, P. Chenniappan, K. Ramalingam, S. Pazhanivelan, and
R. Kaliaperumal, “Smart farming: Internet of things (iot)-based sustain-
able agriculture,” Agriculture, vol. 12, no. 10, 2022.
[13] M. Dobrojevic and N. Bacanin, “Iot as a backbone of intelligent
homestead automation,” Electronics, vol. 11, no. 7, 2022.
[14] “Enabling smart agriculture by implementing artificial intelligence and
embedded sensing,” Computers & Industrial Engineering, vol. 165, p.
107936, 2022.
[15] M. A. Tawfeek, S. Alanazi, and A. A. A. El-Aziz, “Smart greenhouse
based on ann and iot,” Processes, vol. 10, no. 11, 2022.
[16] R. R. A. Siregar, K. B. Seminar, S. Wahjuni, and E. Santosa, “Vertical
farming perspectives in support of precision agriculture using artificial
intelligence: A review,” Computers, vol. 11, no. 9, 2022.
[17] C. Gnauer, H. Pichler, C. Schmittner, M. Tauber, K. Christl,
J. Knapitsch, and M. Parapatits, “A recommendation for suitable tech-
nologies for an indoor farming framework,” e & i Elektrotechnik und
Informationstechnik, vol. 137, no. 7, pp. 370–374, 2020.
[18] S. Maksuti, M. Tauber, and J. Delsing, “Generic autonomic management
as a service in a soa-based framework for industry 4.0,” in IECON 2019-
45th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society,
vol. 1. IEEE, 2019, pp. 5480–5485.
[19] J. Kephart and D. Chess, “The vision of autonomic computing,”
Computer, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 41–50, 2003.
[20] S. Maksuti, M. Zsilak, M. Tauber, and J. Delsing, “Security and
autonomic management in system of systems,” Infocommunications
Journal, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 66–75, 2021.
[21] “A deep reinforcement learning-based multi-agent area coverage control
for smart agriculture,” Computers and Electrical Engineering, vol. 101,
p. 108089, 2022.