Optimized AI and IoT-Driven Framework for Intelligent Water Resource Management

The scheme of water resources management is a necessity for reducing water scarcity in arid areas and improving water availability in general [1]. However, water leak detection and irrigation scheduling traditional AI models are often computationally intensive and require complex hyperparameter tuning, making them less scalable. This study presents an artificial intelligence-based optimization framework that improves forecasting accuracy, computational speed, and real-time adaptability. The architecture combines the ensemble-learning algorithms (XGBoost, LightGBM), hybrid AIs (XGBoost + Autoencoder), and metaheuristic feature selection (GA, PSO, SA) for making intelligent decisions. Moreover, ontology-based feature structuring enhances interpretability, while hyperparameter tuning (GridSearchCV, Bayesian Optimization) and model compression techniques (pruning, quantization, knowledge distillation) ensure computational efficiency. A large number of experiments on real-world IoT sensor data testify to the effectiveness of the framework. It achieves 0.992 AUC-ROC scores for leak detection, an RMSE of 0.227 hours for irrigation scheduling, and an overall accuracy of 94.8%. Additional performance measures comprise precision (89.0%), recall (95.2%), F1-score (0.92), and inference speed (0.003 ms/sample). Although quantization has reduced the computational overhead, we still see a 13.02% increase in the model size as seen in Experiment 6, leading to a trade-off that needs to be optimized further. This study offers a deployable AI-based model for sustainable water management by tackling the issues of scalability, computational cost, and limitations in benchmark evaluation. By virtue of the empirical validation and comparative analysis of the framework, it has been shown to perform better than the regular methods, proving that the methodology can act as a step forward in the field of real-time, AI-assisted irrigation and leak detection systems.