Model-based Irrigation Control using Model Predictive Control and DSSAT Crop Simulator

Water usage for agricultural irrigation has seen an increasing trend due to climate change. As a result, model-based irrigation management has drawn increased research interest in recent years. In this work, a widely used crop simulator, the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT), is utilized to evaluate the performance of a model predictive control (MPC) based irrigation control scheme. The total irrigation amount from MPC is compared to the rule-based irrigation plan from DSSAT, which are further evaluated based on the crop yields from different irrigation plans.