Dynamic irrigation scheduling with stochastic rainfall

Abstract The dynamic irrigation scheduling problem with stochastic weather data was investigated by using the Markov process and dynamic programming. Several stochastic optimization models of different complexity were formulated. A simple one-stage or one-day decision model was also formulated, based on certain simplifying assumptions. This simple model not only considers the daily fluctuations of the price of the crop and the cost of irrigation, it also requires much less memory and thus can be implemented in a small personal computer. Numerical examples based on actual data were solved to illustrate the approach.