ReLU surrogates in mixed-integer MPC for irrigation scheduling

Efficient water management in agriculture is important for mitigating the growing freshwater scarcity crisis. Mixed-integer Model Predictive Control (MPC) has emerged as an effective approach for addressing the complex scheduling problems in agricultural irrigation. However, the computational complexity of mixed-integer MPC still poses a significant challenge, particularly in large-scale applications. This study proposes an approach to enhance the computational efficiency of mixed-integer MPC-based irrigation schedulers by employing Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) surrogate models to describe the soil moisture dynamics of the agricultural field. By leveraging the mixed-integer linear representation of the ReLU operator, the proposed approach transforms the mixed-integer MPC-based scheduler with a quadratic cost function into a mixed-integer quadratic program, which is the simplest class of mixed-integer nonlinear programming problems that can be efficiently solved using global optimization solvers. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated through comparative studies conducted on a large-scale agricultural field across two growing seasons, involving other machine learning surrogate models, specifically Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, and the triggered irrigation scheduling method. The ReLU-based approach significantly reduces solution times—by up to 99.5%—while achieving comparable performance to the LSTM approach in terms of water savings and Irrigation Water Use Efficiency (IWUE). Moreover, the ReLU-based approach achieves enhanced performance in terms of irrigation water savings and IWUE compared to the triggered approach. • MILP formulation of irrigation scheduler based on ReLU networks. • Experimental setup based on real-farm irrigation scheduling needs. • Extensive comparative studies showing the significantly improved efficiency.