SUSTAIN (SUbstrate and Systems of Trays for Agricultural INnovation) is a five-year project funded under the Italian Applied Sciences Fund (FISA 2024) programme of the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR).
The project addresses a key challenge in the transition toward sustainable food production, namely the development of innovative cultivation systems capable of increasing productivity while reducing the consumption of water, energy, and non-renewable resources. Vertical farming and Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) represent promising solutions, but their large-scale deployment is still limited by the availability of efficient, sustainable, and automation-compatible growing systems. The SUSTAIN project addresses this challenge through the mathematical design of novel substrate-tray systems for indoor agriculture.
The core idea is to replace traditional growing media, such as peat-based substrates, with advanced microstructured materials specifically designed to optimize plant growth, nutrient distribution, water retention, mechanical support, recyclability, and compatibility with automated cultivation processes. From a mathematical perspective, the project combines topology optimization, inverse homogenization, multiscale modeling, scientific computing, and advanced numerical methods to generate innovative cellular materials tailored to the physiological requirements of different crops. The resulting structures are manufactured through additive manufacturing technologies and subsequently tested in laboratory and industrial environments.
The project represents a highly interdisciplinary collaboration involving Politecnico di Milano (Prof. Simona Perotto), Università degli Studi di Milano (Profs. Giacomo Cocetta, Roberto Oberti, Fulvia Tambone), and Agricola Moderna (Alessandro Antona, Benjamin Franchetti), one of the leading Italian companies in CEA. Politecnico di Milano contributes expertise in mathematical modeling, optimization, topology optimization, and scientific computing; Università degli Studi di Milano provides competencies in agronomy, plant physiology, and crop performance evaluation; Agricola Moderna is responsible for industrial implementation, automation, testing, and technology transfer. This close interaction between mathematics, material science, agronomy, automation, and industrial engineering enables the development of solutions that are simultaneously mathematically grounded, agronomically effective, and industrially scalable.
Beyond the specific agricultural application, the developed methodologies are relevant to a broad class of inverse design problems in advanced manufacturing and engineering, where mathematical models are used to automatically generate structures with prescribed macroscopic properties. SUSTAIN illustrates how modern applied mathematics can contribute directly to addressing major societal challenges related to food security, sustainability, resource efficiency, and climate resilience, while fostering technology transfer and industrial innovation.
Main contact: simona.perotto@polimi.it