Integrated management irrigation system

Soil water content has a direct influence on the cooling and growth mechani sms of the plants. Crop evapotranspiration is majoring influenced by solar radiation and the air temperature, humidity and movement. An efficient irri gation system must supply and maintain, at soil root zone of the plants, th e adequate amount of water that best regulate the physiological mechanisms of the plant. For this purpose, an intelligent real-time greenhouse irrigat ion system was implemented which uses accurate sensors for measuring soil m oisture, as well to determinate the crop evapotranspiration. To avoid loss of control, it was provided fault-detection capabilities to the soil moistu re sensor and used a knowledge-based approach to estimate replacement value s for the faulty sensors. A model-based controller was implemented to regul ate the water content at the root zone of the plants. These tasks are very complex and difficult to meet, unless microcontroller and microprocessor sy stems are employed, such as in the integrated management irrigation system. The system comprises four modules: Sensor/Actuation, Acquisition and Data Validation, Data Correction, Model Based Controller, and Control Signals Ge neration. All the modules are linked and supervised by a higher-level super vision module to achieve an intelligent irrigation.