A heuristic dynamic optimization algorithm for irrigation scheduling

An irrigation scheduling problem is formulated based on a dynamic crop response model for corn and an evapotranspiration model, which considers the various water losses such as evapotranspiration, evaporation from soil surface, transpiration under different climatic conditions, in detail. A heuristic dynamic optimization method, which reduces the problem to a one variable problem, is developed with a pseudo profit function to resolve the ties that occur due to the missing state variables. The procedure obtained a fairly accurate approximate solution, the accuracy of which depends on the number of iterations and the step size used. Compared with the dynamic programming or other dynamic approaches, this heuristic algorithm is much more efficient, (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.