Optimizing Agricultural Water Distribution with Network Flow Model

The extreme hydrological events that occurred in recent years seriously impacted the water resource distribution in Taiwan. Reducing agricultural water is a compromised policy in competition with domestic and industrial water demand. However, Long-term water supply reduction or fallowing will irreversibly impair the agriculture industry. Our research aims to develop a model to evaluate the policy for agricultural water distribution. The network flow programming is the skeleton of our model. This optimization model has two features: firstly, the hydrological data is adopted in terms of time series function instead of constants of the specific time window; secondly, the hydrological data are transformed from the time domain to the frequency domain. This novel model exhibits practical significance for facilitating water agricultural water resources management and providing decision-support information for determining cropping policy.