| Abstract
|
:
|
Today, the population of Egypt is about 55 million living around the Nile delta and valley. This area is about 6% of the total area of Egypt which is 100,139,004 hectare. With its limited resources, the government has started a project for reclaiming the desert and giving it to the newly graduated people from different universities and high institutes. Most newly graduated desert farm owners in Egypt have no background in farming. Therefore, extension agents in the cooperative company should play an important role in the success of these new farms. In this study, we developed a decision support system (DSS) to be an extension tool for planning, selection, evaluation and management of sprinkler irrigation systems. This DSS combines two programs written in Borland C for calculating water requirements and designing different sprinkler irrigation systems. These sprinkler irrigation systems include periodic moves systems (hand move, end tow, solid set, and side-roll), and continuous move systems (center pivot, linear move, and traveling-sprinkler). The DSS could help in selection of the most suitable sprinkler irrigation system according to physical farm features including; field size, shape, topography, obstructions, cultivated crop, crop height, root depth, soil type, soil texture, climatic condition, labor availability, labor quality and cost. This DSS could also be a useful tool for evaluating the most common sprinkler irrigation systems that include periodically-moved lateral, center pivot, and traveling-sprinkler. Furthermore, it gives recommendations for improving the performance of the system and general management practices. It also could be a useful tool for training owners to evaluate their systems. The DSS list; the equipment needed for evaluation, the field procedure, the layout of catch containers, the full analysis of the field data, and the recommendations based on that analysis. The DSS is verified and validated by three different methods. For domain expert, it agrees in selection in seven out of ten field conditions. For field test, it agrees with four out of five actual systems used. For the known example validation, it completely agrees with the three examples published by Merriam (1978) for evaluating sprinkler lateral, center pivot, and traveling gun.
|