Application of techniques and intelligent algorithms aimed to reduce the consumption of power and water in mixed farming environments

TETRAMAX is a Horizon 2020 innovation action within the European Smart Anything Everywhere (SAE) initiative in the domain of customized and low-energy computing for Cyber Physical Systems and the Internet of Things. As a Digital Innovation Hub, TETRAMAX aims to bring added value to European industry, helping to gain competitive advantage through faster digitization. The project partially builds on experiences with the TETRACOM project during 2013-2016. TETRAMAX was launched in Sep 2017 and runs until Aug 2021.

Center pivot systems are widely used to overcome the irrigation needs of agricultural fields. An autonomous approach is proposed in order to improve the low efficiency of irrigation by developing a system based on the water requirement of the plantations, through field data. The data are local temperature, local wind, soil moisture, precipitation forecast, and soil evapotranspiration calculation. This information enables the system to calculate the real evapotranspiration for not being necessary to restrict to lysimetric measures. By this way, the system schedules the irrigation for the lower cost periods, considering the produced energy by the local resources, and the price of energy purchased from the utility grid. Also, it is considered that the irrigation must be carried out within the time interval in which the plantations do not reach the wilding point, so it will be carried out at the periods with the lowest cost. This will optimize the overall operational costs of the irrigation.