A hybrid digital twin combining physics-based models with IoT sensors accurately controlled a vertical farm’s microclimate 🌡️💧 (±0.1 °C, ±2% RH) and energy use ⚡ (99.5% accuracy), paving the way for smarter, more efficient vertical farming 🌱🏙️.
Vertical farming 🌆🌿 has become one of the most exciting answers to food security in modern cities. But if you’ve ever been inside a vertical farm—or even just a greenhouse—you know how tricky it is to keep everything balanced: temperature, humidity, light, and CO₂. A small fluctuation can affect yield, waste energy, or even harm crops.
That’s where digital twins come in 🌱🌱 —virtual replicas of real farming environments that can simulate, predict, and optimize conditions in real time. The research we’re exploring today developed a hybrid digital twin for a basil-growing phytotron (a plant growth chamber). This digital twin integrates physics-based models with IoT sensors, creating a powerful tool for managing plant environments with unprecedented precision.
Let’s dive into how it works, what the researchers achieved, and what the future looks like.
Vertical farms depend entirely on controlled environments—unlike open fields, nature doesn’t help out with rainfall, wind, or sunshine. Instead, farms use:
💡 LED lighting for photosynthesis
❄️ HVAC systems for temperature
💨 Ventilation and dehumidifiers for humidity
🌬️ CO₂ injection for plant growth
Managing these systems can be energy-hungry ⚡ and expensive. A digital twin makes it possible to test strategies virtually—like changing lighting patterns or ventilation schedules—before applying them in the real farm. That way, farmers can reduce costs while improving yields.
Unlike many models that rely purely on AI or purely on physics, this research team combined both worlds into a hybrid approach.
The researchers created a set of heat and mass-balance equations to describe how temperature, humidity, and plant transpiration behave inside the phytotron.
Think of it as a mathematical recipe 📊 for how heat moves around when the lights turn on, the air conditioner kicks in, or plants release moisture.
They installed a distributed IoT sensor system:
The model was fine-tuned with a genetic algorithm—an AI-inspired method that “evolves” the best parameters, just like natural selection. This ensured the digital twin stayed tightly aligned with real-world data.
The results were impressive:
🌡️ Temperature accuracy: deviation of only 0.1 °C
💧 Humidity accuracy: error within 2%
⚡ Energy prediction: 99.5% accurate compared to real data
That means the digital twin didn’t just simulate conditions—it mirrored the real system almost perfectly.
Even better, compared to more traditional CFD (computational fluid dynamics) models or pure machine learning methods, this hybrid digital twin:
The ability to predict energy use and plant environment stability is a game-changer for vertical farms.
💡 Imagine you’re running a vertical basil farm in a dense city. Your energy bill is massive, and every degree of unnecessary cooling means wasted money. With this digital twin, you could:
In short, it helps balance 🌱 crop health, 💸 energy efficiency, and 🛠️ equipment reliability.
The research team also outlined exciting directions for the next generation of digital twins in vertical farming:
This hybrid digital twin is more than an academic exercise—it’s a practical, scalable tool for the farms of the future. With an initial system cost of around $2900 (sensors + controllers + software), it provides a realistic entry point for commercial vertical farms looking to adopt smart farming technologies.
As climate challenges rise and urban populations grow, digital twins could become the backbone of vertical farming, ensuring reliable harvests, reduced energy use, and sustainable food supplies 🌍🥗.
The study shows that hybrid digital twins can precisely model and optimize vertical farm environments with affordable sensors and modest computing power. By bridging physics-based science with real-time IoT data, this approach unlocks smarter, greener farming.
The future of urban agriculture isn’t just about stacking crops higher—it’s about making every layer smarter. And with digital twins, that future is already here 🌱.
🌱 Vertical Farming - Growing crops indoors in stacked layers using controlled environments instead of soil and sunlight. Think of it as “high-rise farms” inside buildings. - More about this concept in the article "Revolutionizing Vertical Farming: How a Jellyfish-Inspired Algorithm Optimizes Multi-Robot Path Planning 🐙 🤖 🌱".
🖥️ Digital Twin - A virtual replica of a real system (like a farm) that stays updated with live data, letting you simulate, predict, and optimize conditions before changing anything in real life. - More about this concept in the article "Digital Twin for High-Performance Computing ⚡ Smarter, Greener, Faster".
📡 IoT (Internet of Things) - A network of smart devices—like sensors, meters, or cameras—that collect and share real-time data over the internet or local networks. - More about this concept in the article "Digital Twins Tech 🧱 Reinvents Dike Safety".
🌡️ Phytotron - A special climate-controlled chamber designed for growing plants under precise conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and CO₂.
🔬 Physics-Based Model - A set of equations that use the laws of physics (like heat transfer or humidity balance) to predict how a system behaves. - More about this concept in the article "Generative AI vs Wildfires 🔥 The Future of Fire Forecasting".
🧠 Genetic Algorithm (GA) - An optimization method inspired by natural selection—it “evolves” better solutions over many iterations until the best fit is found. - More about this concept in the article "Quantum-Inspired Algorithm Tackles Urban Noise Pollution: A Breakthrough for Smart Cities 🌆 🎤 🔊".
⚡ Energy Consumption Monitoring - Tracking how much electricity each device (like lights, heaters, or fans) uses in order to optimize costs and efficiency.
💧 Transpiration - The process where plants release water vapor through their leaves—kind of like “plant sweating.” It affects humidity in the farm.
💡 LED Grow Lights - Special light-emitting diode lamps that provide the right spectrum of light to support photosynthesis in indoor farming.
📶 LoRaWAN - A low-power, long-range wireless communication protocol that lets sensors send data reliably, even in big facilities.
Source: Bukhtoyarov, V.V.; Nekrasov, I.S.; Timofeenko, I.A.; Gorodov, A.A.; Kartushinskii, S.A.; Trofimov, Y.V.; Lishik, S.I. Hybrid Digital Twin for Phytotron Microclimate Control: Integrating Physics-Based Modeling and IoT Sensor Networks. AgriEngineering 2025, 7, 285. https://doi.org/10.3390/agriengineering7090285
From: Siberian Federal University; Bauman Moscow State Technical University; Center LED and Optoelectronics Technologies of National Academy Sciences of Belarus.
