Agricultural irrigation scheduling for a crop management system considering water and energy use optimization

Center pivot systems are widely used to overcome the irrigation needs of agricultural fields. In this paper, an autonomous approach is proposed in order to improve the low efficiency of irrigation by developing a system based on the water requirement of the plantations, through field data. The data are local temperature, local wind, soil moisture, precipitation forecast, and soil evapotranspiration calculation. This information enables the system to calculate the real evapotranspiration for not being necessary to restrict to lysimetric measures. By this way, the system schedules the irrigation for the lower cost periods, considering the produced energy by the local resources, and the price of energy purchased from the utility grid. Also, it is considered that the irrigation must be carried out within the time interval in which the plantations do not reach the wilding point, so it will be carried out at the periods with the lowest cost. This will optimize the overall operational costs of the irrigation.