Title: Geo-informatics based Intelligent Decision Support System for Efficient Irrigation

Water Management

Authors: Mahmood Khan, Md. Zahidul Islam, Mohsin Hafeez, Wolfgang Flugel, Yann Chemin

Abstract:

Prolonged drought and water shortages pose the need for efficient water use in agriculture.
Tools for monitoring irrigation water use and water productivity are becoming increasingly
important. Agriculture is the primary water consumer in Australia, accounting for 70% of the
total consumptive water. Since all the available water resources are fully committed and
additional water is not available the best strategy is to enhance water productivity. For
efficient water management there is a need for integration of spatial data on various
aspects of water supply and demand. Advances in Remote Sensing (RS), Information
Technology, Geographical Information System and hydrological modeling offer a novel way
to integrate the spatial data to estimate actual water use, water demand, and allocation in a
real time environment.

This paper presents a Decision Support System (DSS) called Integrated River Information
System (IRIS) which has data storage and retrieval functions, and hydrological models to
make the decision-making process simple and interactive for a smart water management
system. The DSS is developed using the PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) scripting language.

The PHP generally runs on a web server (Apache). PostgreSQL is chosen as the database,
because it is object relational database management system (ORDBMS) and open source
software. Map Server is used as a platform for displaying the geodata within the DSS.
The IRIS is developed for the Coleambally irrigation Area located in the southeastern Murray
Darling Basin of Australia. The IRIS is a comprehensive web-based platform involving RS
technologies, and wireless sensor networks to encompass a range of spatial and temporal
data processing, for water management decision-making at the irrigated farm and node
level.

IRIS can assists the irrigation companies and farmers in operational decision making, by
using information from integrated analysis of hydrological data and near real time RS
processed data for better irrigation water management.