Smart water management approach for resource allocation in High-Scale irrigation systems

Water is a common resource shared by many agents or farmers in irrigation districts, where water management is, therefore, a very complex problem if the target is the equitable distribution of resources or the efficient use of water. This paper aims to present the design and implementation of an Irrigation Agent-Based Model (IABM) for the distribution of water in an irrigation district. In the IABM proposed, each field or farm can be considered as a micro-level and a region or irrigation district as a macro-level. The most approximated irrigation scheduling at each micro-level allows determining the water needs at the macro-level, as a reference for the negotiation of water distribution. A Geographical Information System (GIS) was used to manage georeferenced field information. Field capacity and permanent wilting point values, initial soil moisture, crop types, crop coefficients, root depth, sowing dates and weather data were incorporated into the IABM model for determining irrigation prescriptions. When water available in the irrigation district is insufficient to supply water requirements of all the irrigation fields, the IABM allows water distribution among them according to the cultivated field sizes, irrigation priorities, phenological states and the behavior of neighbors. When water resources are distributable, the proposed negotiation algorithm ensures that fields will use irrigation prescriptions defined with technical and agronomic criteria, thus avoiding the waste of water resource. The IABM developed meets the satisfaction requirement of the greatest number of agents by avoiding as much as possible that the soil water stress increases, using 25% of permissible level of moisture depletion respect to the total available water in each field. •An Agent-Based model (ABM) was implemented for negotiation of water in an irrigation district.•The irrigation ABM was made up of the perception, negotiation and satisfaction algorithms.•Agent behavior was influenced by the agent own interests, but also by their neighbors.•The soil water stress coefficient was used for implementing the satisfaction algorithm.