Real-time energy optimization of irrigation scheduling by parallel multi-objective genetic algorithms

The present work is motivated by the need to reduce the energy costs arising from the pressure demands of drip and sprinkling irrigation, compounded by the increase in the energy price in recent years. Researchers have demonstrated that proper operation of the irrigation network reduces associated pumping costs. The main challenge was to obtain the optimal operation parameters on near real-time due to the fact that the high complexity of the optimization problem requires a great computational effort. The classic approach to the problem imposes a strict fulfilment of minimum pressures as a restriction. This study, however, presents a new methodology for the reordering of irrigation scheduling, incorporating the constraint of daily volume requests for each hydrant. The methodology is capable of minimizing the cost of energy while maximizing pressures at the critical hydrants. Cost reductions of about 6–7% were reached for scenarios without pressure deficit for the case study. Greater computational efficiency was achieved by posing the problem from a multi-objective approach, on the one hand, and by establishing the parallel evaluation of the objective function, on the other. The speed-up obtained by combining a reduction in the number of function evaluations thanks to the faster convergence of the multi-objective approach and the reduction of the computational time due to the parallelization of the algorithm achieved results about 10 times faster. This improvement allowed the tool to be implemented for the daily optimization of irrigation requests.