A proposal and simulation of a trading market for lettuces supplied by plant factories

Abstract

Much emphasis is now being given to research and development of plant factories which daily produce a large volume of high-quality vegetables under artificially controlled environments. One of the important issues to be considered for the management and the daily operations of the plant factories is to find a set of suitable customers and/or markets to which the daily produced vegetables are sold and delivered. The current wholesale markets of the vegetables are not suitable for trading the high-quality vegetables produced by the plant factories, therefore, a new market is required to sell and to buy the products made by the plant factories. A new trading market system is proposed, to sell and to buy the lettuces supplied by the plant factories, based on the stock exchange mechanisms, in this paper. An estimation method of yield rate is also proposed to generate a suitable volume of sales for the plant factories. Some case studies have been carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed trading market.