Inexact De Novo Programming for Agricultural Irrigation System Planning

Rapid population growth and economic development have led to increasing reliance on water resources. For agricultural irrigation systems, reasonable water resource allocation is necessary to support a significant increase in food demand during the next decade. The de novo programming method was effective for seeking a portfolio of resource levels to deal with optimal design problems by allocating a budget. In this study, an inexact agriculture irrigation de novo model was developed to obtain optimal water-allocation strategies for agricultural irrigation systems through the design of optimal agricultural irrigation management systems under uncertainty. This model has the advantages in constructing optimal agricultural irrigation system design via an ideal system by introducing the flexibility toward the available resources in the system constraints. The inexact agriculture irrigation de novo model was then applied to a regional agricultural management problem to design an optimization agricultural irrigation management system under limited budget, instead of finding the optimum in a given system with fixed resources in an agricultural irrigation planning case. The model was taken account into conjunctive use of surface and groundwater resources and some other necessary resources input. Results demonstrate that the developed model efficiently produced stable solutions under different objectives during the planning period. Obtained results can help decision makers identify desired all kinds of resource input for agricultural sustainability within a given budget under uncertainty.