Data-driven greenhouse climate regulation in lettuce cultivation using BiLSTM and GRU predictive control

Efficient greenhouse management is essential for sustainable food production, but the high energy demand for climate regulation poses significant economic and environmental challenges. While traditional process-based greenhouse models exist, they are often too complex or imprecise for reliable control. To address this, our study introduces a novel data-driven predictive control framework using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) neural networks within a Model Predictive Control (MPC) architecture. Training data were generated from a validated dynamic model simulating lettuce cultivation under various environmental conditions. The LSTM and GRU networks were trained to predict future greenhouse states — including temperature, humidity, CO 2 concentration, and crop dry matter — with robustness confirmed via 10-fold cross-validation. These networks were embedded into an online MPC controller to optimize heating, ventilation, and CO 2 injection, aiming to minimize energy consumption and maximize crop yield while respecting biological constraints. Results showed that both the LSTM- and GRU-based controllers significantly outperformed a conventional MPC baseline. For example, humidity violations dropped from 54.77% (MPC) to 15.45% (GRU) and 17.71% (LSTM), while day–night temperature deviations were kept below 2 ∘ C . The GRU controller further achieved up to 40% lower computation time than its LSTM counterpart, confirming its real-time feasibility. Overall, the proposed GRU-driven predictive control approach offers a robust and computationally efficient solution for intelligent greenhouse climate automation under practical operational constraints. • GRU and LSTM models were applied for greenhouse climate predictive control. • GRU reduced climate violations by 5% compared to LSTM while matching yield. • GRU required 40% less computation time than LSTM in real-time scenarios. • Both models maintained high crop yield and economic performance. • GRU offers a practical solution for energy-efficient greenhouse control.