Comparative Power and Energy Consumptions between Scheduled and Fuzzy Controlling on an IoT-based Vertical Farming

Recently, one trend of research is an investigation on vertical farming based on the internet of things (IoT). It involves some methods of controlling system, physical parameters including sensors and transducers, both hardware and software, and energy consumption. Nevertheless, this paper focuses on electric power and energy consumption. The electrical quantities were voltage and current, which were sensed and entered to Arduino Mega 2560 to be processed, and further to a Node MCU ESP8266, smartphone, and Blynk to monitor and log the data of power based on the internet of things (IoT). The loads were LED lamps and pH pumps through a relay. The controlling systems were scheduled and fuzzy bases, to be compared. The power was directly monitored and logged in every one minute by using the Blynk of a smartphone, whereas the energy was computed by using trapezoidal and Simpson's composite rules. For one day, the fuzzy-based method could save 85.05 Wh (5.44%) and 84.32 Wh (5.42%) compared to the scheduled-based method, using the trapezoidal and Simpson’s composite rules respectively. The hourly-absolute-based energy differences between the scheduled and fuzzy bases were 116.66 Wh and 116.03 Wh using trapezoidal and Simpson’s composite rules respectively, for one day. While both computations yielded a deviation of 0.40% only. Thus, the fuzzy-base controlling method could considerably save consumed energy.