Commercial sugarcane farming requires large quantities of water to be delivered to the fields. Ideal irrigation schedules are produced indicating how much water to be supplied to fields considering multiple objectives in the farming process. Software packages do not fully account for the fact that the ideal irrigation schedule may not be met due to limitations in the water distribution network. This dissertation proposes the use of mathematical modelling to better understand water supply and demand management on a commercial sugarcane farm. Due to the complex nature of water stress on sugarcane, non-linearities occur in the model. A piecewise linear approximation is used to handle the non-linearity in the water allocation model and is solved in a commercial optimisation software package. A test data set is first used to exercise and evaluate the model performance, then to illustrate the practical applicability of the model, a commercial sized data set is used and analysed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uct/oai:localhost:11427/24455 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Patel, Zubair |
| Contributors | Stray, Jonas, Stewart, Theodor J |
| Publisher | University of Cape Town, Faculty of Science, Department of Statistical Sciences |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Master Thesis, Masters, MSc |
| Format | application/pdf |
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