  Plant factories with artificial light are widely researched for food
production in a controlled environment. For such control tasks, models of the
energy and resource exchange in the production unit as well as those of the
plant's growth process may be used. To achieve minimal operation cost, optimal
control strategies can be applied to the system, taking into account the
availability of resources by control reference specification. A particular
advantage of model predictive control (MPC) is the incorporation of constraints
that comply with actuator limitations and general plant growth conditions. In
this work, a model of a production unit is derived including a description of
the relation between the actuators' electrical signals and the input values to
the model. Furthermore, a preliminary model based state tracking control is
evaluated for production unit containing Lettuce. It could be observed that the
controller is capable to track the reference while satisfying the constraint
under changing weather conditions and resource availability.
