Addressing the dual challenges of efficient water resource utilization and high construction costs in agricultural production, this study proposes a low-cost sprinkler irrigation system featuring a joint optimized design of water supply facilities and sprinkler layout. Initially, to mitigate water wastage at the field boundaries, an enhanced sprinkler layout is designed. This design strategically adjusts sprinkler spacing to position units along the irrigation area’s perimeter, leveraging their adjustable spray angles for semicircular coverage, thereby achieving superior water conservation compared to traditional honeycomb full coverage layouts. Subsequently, considering the non-linear relationship between pipeline cost and its length and flow rate, a supply network comprising five independent pipelines running perpendicular to the river is constructed. Furthermore, water storage tanks are strategically located at the head of each pipeline near the water source to reduce costs. Finally, constrained by the daily soil moisture levels required for crop survival, an inference-based dimension reduction algorithm is employed to jointly optimize the daily pipeline flow rate and storage tank capacity for each supply line. Specifically, by constructing the functional mapping between flow rate and tank capacity, the complex bivariate optimization problem is reduced to a single-variable extremum problem. Additionally, a calculation method for the feasible region of decision variables is proposed to ensure solution validity. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves a minimum total construction cost of CNY 2,611,404.00 with a total storage tank capacity of 114,892.40 L, and generates a detailed daily irrigation strategy. This study offers a significant model reference and a technical pathway for developing agricultural irrigation systems that are both economical and efficient.
Lyu et al. (Fri,) studied this question.