Internet of things and agent-based system to improve water use efficiency in collective irrigation

The efficient management of water resources is a major issue in the field of
 sustainable development. Several models of solving this problem can be 
 found in the literature, especially in the agricultural sector which
 represents the main consumer through irrigation. Therefore, Irrigation
 management is an important and innovative field that has been the subject
 of several types of research and studies to deal with the different
 activities, behaviors, and conflicts between the different users. This
 article introduces an intelligent irrigation system based on smart sensors
 that can be used moderately and economically to monitor farms by
 integrating some connected electronic devices and other advantageous
 instruments widely used in the field of IoT, it determines the water
 requirement of each farm according to the water loss due to the process of
 evapotranspiration. The water requirement is calculated from data collected
 from a series of sensors installed in the plantation farm. This project
 focuses on smart irrigation based on IoT and agent technology, it can be
 used by farmer associations whose endowments and irrigation planning are
 defined according to the need and quantity of water available in the rural
 municipality. The system includes a microcontroller with the integration of
 sensors, actuators, and valve modules where each node serves as an IoT
 device. Environmental parameters are monitored directly through a
 multi-agent system that facilitates the control of each node and the
 configuration of irrigation parameters. The amount of water calculated for
 irrigation is based on the Penman model for calculating the daily
 evapotranspiration baseline. Compared to the conventional irrigation method,
 it is expected that the proposed irrigation model would contribute to saving
 water use and distributing it impartially without compromising its
 production.