A Comparative Analysis between Heuristic and Data-Driven Water Management Control for Precision Agriculture Irrigation

Modeling and control theory applied to precision agriculture irrigation systems have been essential to reduce water consumption while growing healthy crops. Specifically, implementing closed-loop control irrigation based on soil moisture measurements is an effective approach for obtaining water savings in this resource-intensive activity. To enhance this strategy, the work presented in this paper proposed a new set of water management strategies for the case in which multiple irrigation areas share a single water supply source and compared them with heuristic approaches commonly used by farmers in practice. The proposed water allocation algorithms are based on techniques used in real-time computing, such as dynamic priority and feedback scheduling. Therefore, the multi-area irrigation system is presented as a resource allocation problem with availability constraints, where water consumption represents the main optimization parameter. The obtained results show that the data-driven water allocation strategies preserve the water savings for closed-loop control systems and avoid crop water stress due to the limited access to irrigation water.