Incorporating economy and water demand rate uncertainty into decision-making for agricultural water allocation during droughts

Abstract

Determining sources of uncertainty in the agricultural water supply helps to increase irrigation scheduling accuracy. Among the most important sources of uncertainty parameters such as evapotranspiration, coefficient of sensitivity to water stress, cultivation costs, selling prices of products, and water allocated to plants. This study was conducted to estimate the fluctuations of the response due to the uncertainty of four parameters of soil moisture, water provided for cultivation, cost of cultivation during the growing season, and coefficient of sensitivity to drought. In the concept of water and food nexus, two basic factors, including increasing economic productivity and achieving maximum product production, are known as decision criteria. Therefore, mathematical modeling of net income and the ratio of actual and potential yield production has been prepared according to the four uncertain input variables of the problem. The proposed model has used a multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm to estimate the best values of non-deterministic variables. The results of the uncertainty analysis showed that the range of changes in performance and net profit compared to the coefficient of sensitivity to water stress has different ranges and mechanisms and knowing the nature of each helps to improve the responses.