Low-Cost Wireless Monitoring and Decision Support for Water Saving in Agriculture

A decision support system based on the combination of the wireless sensor and actuation network technology and the fuzzy logic theory is proposed to support the irrigation management in agriculture. The farmers' experience and the irrigation best practices are modeled through fuzzy rule sets, and the outputs of numerical soil and crop models are used to provide a context-aware and optimized irrigation schedule. The suggested actions are devoted to reduce the waste of water and to maximize the crop yield according to the weather conditions and the real water needs. The proposed methodology is embedded in the network gateway making the system, a truly smart and autonomous wireless decision support system. The numerical validation and the experiments performed in a vineyard in the north of Italy point out a considerable water saving respect to other state-of-the-art methods based on parameters thresholding, and an improved exploitation of the irrigated water thanks to the reduction of the percolation phenomenon without affecting the quality of the crops.