A Deployable Digital Twin System for Precision Irrigation Management via Deep Reinforcement Learning
Abstract:
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) shows great
potential in irrigation scheduling. However, deploying complex
DRL models on field hardware remains difficult. This paper
proposes a deployable smart irrigation system. We integrate a
biophysical crop growth model with an agent. A modular Python-Flask backend enables efficient real-time inference. We decoupled
inference from training to reduce computational overhead.
The system uses a bidirectional long short-term memory encoder
to extract temporal features. We developed a browser/server (B/S)
architecture dashboard for real-time monitoring and explainable
decision heatmaps. System-level validation was conducted using
historical data from Xinjiang cotton fields. The results show sub-10 ms inference latency and a 0.45 s total system response time.
The system provides a 1.9% yield and 5.9% irrigation water use
efficiency (IWUE) boost over standard soft actor-critic (SAC)
algorithms, proving its algorithmic efficacy. This architecture
transforms theoretical gains into executable irrigation schedules
for real-world farming. It ensures stable and failure-free operation
across continuous growing seasons.
Published in:The International Journal of Intelligent Control and Systems (Volume: 31, Issue: 1, 2026-03-31)
Page(s):100 - 105