Model-predictive control of irrigation - a case study in India

Agriculture is a major consumer of freshwater, in particular in countries like India. From the perspectives of crop yield and water conservation, the development of advanced model-based irrigation scheduling methods is desirable. Most of the farming in India is done by small-scale farmers and to serve their needs, we are developing a simple model-based system that can be applied semi-manually and does not need expensive sensors and costly data. In this article, an optimal irrigation system, based on Model Predictive Control (MPC), which uses a physics-based model to compute an optimal amount of irrigation for the next day, is developed. The robustness of the developed system is tested by comparing the effect of errors in a key model parameter as well as in the weather forecast. Copyright (c) 2023 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC- ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)