Project Portugal 2020

Operation code Code that identifies each project carried out using European funding.

Conclusion date

Summary

The SNAP concerns the proof of concept for Plant Factories. The motivation relies on the need to feeding large urban centers by timely supplying food, as well as a variety of medicinal or cosmetic products of vegetal origin produced in locations close to them entails substantial cuts in production costs and anthropogenic footprint, due to the significant decrease in environmental pressure in rural environments, in transportation, distribution, storage, and conservation. Moreover, the envisaged capability of controlling plant growth in a strongly controlled, and minimally intrusive context promotes not only a whole new level of food security, but also practically minimize the different market supply and consumer acquisition times which strongly mitigates the loss of perishable foods. The SNAP project involves two Research Lines (RLs). While RL1 investigates the investigation of the agronomic, and biological challenges leading to a better understanding of the involved phenomena and, ultimately to models of the growth of a selected number of plants, RL2 handles the systemic framework required to develop the management and control systems required in order to increase the system performance and the competitiveness of the Plant Factory System relatively to the current alternatives. Current Plant Factories feature very high production costs (mainly due to the consumption of energy), on the top of the very large investment in infra-structure. The consortium will bring the SNAP project to the center of its large international network, centred mainly in the European Union. Moreover, Stakeholders and endusers will be aggregated as described in the task concerning the management of project. The SNAP project is led by CMUP and involves the research units SYSTEC, Green UPorto, and ICT with a total of 11 staff members, 7 additional researchers with PhD degree and 5 PhD students to be hired with funds from the project. While CMUP, Green UPorto, and ICT are hosted at FCUP, SYSTEC is hosted at FEUP. The total requested funding is 598252,76 Euros and the co-participation of the co-promoters is of BBBB Euros. The host institutions also contribute with their own laboratories, notably, FEUP contributes with Laboratory on Control, Estimation and Optimization and with the Laboratory on Advanced Energy Systems, CMUP, ICT, and GreenUPorto