Exploring the performance of an evolutionary algorithm for greenhouse control

Evolutionary algorithms for optimization of dynamic problems have recently received increasing attention. Online control is a particularly interesting class of dynamic problems, because of the interactions between the controller and the controlled system. In this paper, we report experimental results on two aspects of the direct control strategy in relation to a crop-producing greenhouse. In the first set of experiments, we investigated how to balance the available computation time between population size and generations. The second experiments were on different control horizons, and showed the importance of this aspect for direct control. Finally, we discuss the results in the wider context of dynamic optimization.