A flexible decision support system for irrigation scheduling in an irrigation district in China

Decision support systems for agricultural irrigation scheduling are generally designed and developed for specific agricultural regions or irrigation districts. Flexible irrigation scheduling decision support tools which are applicable to various irrigation districts are desired for sound agricultural irrigation planning and management. This study attempts to develop a flexible irrigation scheduling decision support system (FIS-DSS) which could be easily customized and adapted to different irrigation districts and cases, and thus repeated software development is not needed. The developed FIS-DSS includes a user interface, a knowledge base, and an inference engine. As the core module of the FIS-DSS, the inference engine uses specific computer programs to maneuver the knowledge base, and the knowledge base was used to store and provide data, knowledge, information and rules for the inference engine. As the core of the FIS-DSS, a fuzzy interval programming model with multiple objectives and constrains was developed with advantages in data processing, model flexibility, alternative solving algorithm and friendly result display. The system users can obtain suitable water allocation schemes for each crop on a temporal and spatial fashion by modifying the model inputs and scenarios through the software interface. A case study was introduced to demonstrate the functions and operations of the FIS-DSS, and useful information has been generated to provide a practical guidance for agricultural water allocation and utilization.