Studies of evolutionary algorithms for the reduced Tomgro model calibration for modelling tomato yields

Abstract

The reduced Tomgro model is one of the popular biophysical models, which can reflect the actual growth process and model the yields of tomato-based on environmental parameters in a greenhouse. It is commonly integrated with the greenhouse environmental control system for optimally controlling environmental parameters to maximize the tomato growth/yields under acceptable energy consumption. In this work, we compare three mainstream evolutionary algorithms (genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and differential evolutionary (DE)) for calibrating the reduced Tomgro model, to model the tomato mature fruit dry matter (DM) weights. Different evolutionary algorithms have been applied to calibrate 14 key parameters of the reduced Tomgro model. And the performance of the calibrated Tomgro models based on different evolutionary algorithms has been evaluated based on three datasets obtained from a real tomato grower, with each dataset containing greenhouse environmental parameters (e.g., carbon dioxide concentration, temperature, photosynthetically active radiation (PAR)) and tomato yield information at a particular greenhouse for one year. Multiple metrics (root mean square errors (RMSEs), relative root mean square errors (r-RSMEs), and mean average errors (MAEs)) between actual DM weights and model-simulated ones for all three datasets, are used to validate the performance of calibrated reduced Tomgro model.

Keywords

• Reduced Tomgro model
• Evolutionary algorithms
• Model calibration
• Yield prediction