A Smart Irrigation Tool to Determine the Effects of ENSO on Water Requirements for Tomato Production in Mozambique

Irrigation scheduling is used by growers to determine the right amount and timing of water application. In most parts of Mozambique, 90% of the total yearly precipitation occurs from November to March. The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon influences the climate in Mozambique and affects the water demand for crop production. The objectives of this work were to quantify the effects of ENSO phenomenon on tomato crop water requirements, and to create the AgroClimate irrigation tool (http://mz.agroclimate.org/) to assist farmers in improving irrigation management. This study was based on daily grid-based climate information from 1983 to 2016 from the Climate Forecast System Reanalysis. Daily crop evapotranspiration was calculated by Hargreaves equation and crop coefficients. This tool is available online and considers different planting dates, ENSO phases, and crop growing season lengths. Irrigation needs varied from less than 250 mm per growing cycle during winter to 550 mm during spring. Both El Niño and La Niña influenced the irrigation scheduling, especially from November to March. El Niño periods were related to increased water demand due to drier and warmer conditions, while the opposite was observed for La Niña. The ENSO information might be used to understand climate variability and improve tomato irrigation scheduling in Mozambique

Using timed automata for modeling, simulating and verifying networked systems controller's specifications

The development of dependable controllers can be a very complex task. For this purpose, some synthesis and analysis modern computational techniques can be used. In this paper, simulation and formal verification analysis techniques are used in a concurrent way in order to validate formal communication requirements of generic object oriented substation event and sample value communication protocols from the IEC 61850 standard. Because these techniques are used in a complementary way, the formalism and tools used for both are the same: timed automata for modeling, and UPPAAL model checker for performing simulation and formal verification tasks. Also, we show that the use of timed automata formalism is suitable for modeling the controllers' specifications, specifying the time requirements for information exchanging taking into account networked controllers, and, as it is a non-deterministic formalism, for analyzing the plant behavior. The concepts developed in this study were successfully tested in an application in the control system of an automated people mover.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio