Systems engineering for irrigation systems: Successes and challenges

In Australia, gravity fed irrigation systems are critical infrastructure essential to agricultural production and export. By supplementing these large scale civil engineering systems with an appropriate information infrastructure, sensors, actuators and a communication network it is feasible to use systems engineering ideas to improve the exploitation of the irrigation system. This paper reports how classical ideas from system identification and control can be used to automate irrigation systems to deliver a near on-demand water supply with vastly improved overall distribution efficiency.