Model-Driven Performance Analysis of Large Scale Irrigation Networks

Irrigation networks play a fundamental part in the agriculture system of various countries. In the wake of global environmental challenges and economic competition, efficient use of water resources has become extremely important. This can only be achieved by developing smarter control infrastructures for irrigation networks, via the incorporation of communication and computation technologies. Thus, future irrigation networks represent a prime example of cyber physical systems. Effective operation of these complex cyber physical systems is not possible with conventional methods and requires unprecedented levels of automation and decision-support tools. We argue that these cyber physical systems will require a complete model-driven toolset for effective operation. As a first step towards that tool flow, we have developed a model-driven simulation infrastructure for irrigation networks. In the future, we propose to complete the toolset by developing a model-driven configuration infrastructure. Our contributions in this paper include the development of a domain-specific modeling language (DSML) for irrigation networks, implementation of this DSML in Generic Modeling Environment (GME), and automatic simulator M-file generation capability from the DSML-based case diagram of an arbitrary irrigation network. Moreover, we present case studies of water distribution and flood management to show the utility as well as the effectiveness of our approach. We also present the performance of our toolset for the realistic scenario of irrigation networks in Pakistan.