Smart decision support tools for optimal crop planning and piped irrigation system design.

Abstract

The high population density and the projected rapidly increasing population in sub-Saharan Africa and Uganda in particular combined with the effect of the increasingly inadequate and irregular rainfall patterns due to climate change have led to the increased need for modern piped irrigation networks to cope with the increasing demand and diminishing supply of food. However, most agricultural practitioners are limited by the use of personal judgement to select the crop to grow as well as the highly tedious and intellectually challenging computations for the type of piped irrigation system to install. This project, therefore, is inclined towards optimizing the cropping patterns ensuring land utilization and minimising the initial and operational costs of using piped irrigation systems whilst reducing the time taken to design an efficient piped irrigation system through the use of a genetic algorithm for optimisation of the system parameters and Epanet-Matlab toolkit for simulation using pressure and discharge as the parameters. Keywords: Irrigation systems, Epanet-Matlab toolkit, Genetic algorithm, Optimisation.