A Smart Vertical Farming System to Evaluate Productivity, Quality, and Sustainability of Agricultural Production

Traditional agricultural practices negatively impact the environment, and they usually don’t allow flexible crop production. Vertical farming has been discovered to be an effective remedy for these problems. It has higher yields, and it can be more flexible and performant than open-field agriculture, because of its structural and technological characteristics. To get the best performance from vertical farming systems, it is necessary to consider several KPIs, which assess productivity, quality and sustainability aspects. The aim of this work is to identify both the input variables and the KPIs that must be considered in a vertical farming system. Furthermore, the experimental design of an aeroponic chamber is proposed, for conducting experiments varying the input variable values and collecting the related KPI. The analysis of such data will allow to find correlations between the input variables and the KPIs.