2020年12月14日学术报告

报告题目（Titile1）: Toward water sustainability in agriculture through closed-loop irrigation control and scheduling

报告人姓名（Speaker）: Jinfeng Liu

时间（Date&Time）: 2020年12月14日上午09：00-10：00

报告题目（Titile2）: How to write excellent scientific papers

报告人姓名（Speaker）: Jinfeng Liu

时间（Date&Time）: 2020年12月14日上午09：00-10：00

地点(Locations): 物联网工程学院C317, 采用线上报告形式， 利用软件“腾讯会议”，进入一下链接下载https://meeting.tencent.com/index.html

报告摘要(Abstract): 

Water is essential for our daily life and is at the core of sustainable development. It is inextricably linked to climate change, agriculture, food security, health, equality, gender and education. Water supply crisis has been consistently recognized as one of the greatest global risks by the World Economic Forum. Population growth is the major factor causing the global water supply crisis. Water management is not a trivial concern, especially as food and water are inextricably linked. Agricultural irrigation consumes about 70% of the global fresh water withdrawals. As population growth continues, 60% more food will be needed to satisfy the demand of more than 9 billion people worldwide by 2050. However, in many regions, water allocated to irrigation is largely capped. The irrigation water-use efficiency worldwide is low (around 50% to 60%). New technologies for more efficient irrigation need to be developed; otherwise, water scarcity will become a global issue in the near future.

In the current agricultural irrigation practice for large-scale agriculture fields, the amount of water to be irrigated and the time to apply the irrigation are determined in advance based on irrigators’ knowledge. The actual conditions in the field are generally not considered in determining the irrigation amount and time. From a process systems engineering (PSE) perspective, the current irrigation practice is an “open-loop” decision making process. It is well recognized in process control that open-loop control is not precise. A “smarter” approach to agricultural irrigation is to close the decision-making loop to form “closed-loop” irrigation.

In the closed-loop system, sensing instruments (e.g., soil moisture sensors, evapotranspiration (ET) gauge, thermal cameras) are used to collect various real-time field information (e.g., soil moisture, ET, temperature) regularly. The various field information is then fused together to get estimates of the entire field’s conditions. The estimated field conditions are then fed back to an adaptive control system. The adaptive control system calculates the best irrigation commands for the next few hours or day based on a field model, the estimated field conditions, local weather forecast as well as other pre-specified irrigation requirements. Due to significant nonlinearities, uncertainties, and very large sizes of the fields, there are many great challenges that need to be addressed. We have been working towards this closed-loop smart irrigation vision in collaboration with different partners including sensor manufacturer, farmers, and government agency. I will share my views on the role of process systems engineering in this closed-loop smart irrigation vision, the great challenges and opportunities in modelling, sensing, and control of irrigation systems, and introduce some of our recent progress.

报告人简介（Biography）: 

Dr. Jinfeng Liu is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering at the University of Alberta. He received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from UCLA, and MSc and BSc both from Zhejiang University. His research interests are in the general area of process systems and control engineering with the current research focus on the development of enabling modeling, estimation and control methods to address the great challenges in closed-loop smart agricultural irrigation for water sustainability. Based on the work on closed-loop irrigation, Dr. Liu was recognized as an Emerging Leader in the 69th Canadian Chemical Engineering Conference.

Dr. Liu have published 3 books, 1 edited special issue, more than 100 journal and conference papers. His research has received over 4000 citations and his books have received over 27,000 chapter downloads. Two papers published in AIChE Journal were recognized as most cited articles and one paper published in Chemical and Computers Engineering was identified as a most downloaded paper. Dr. Liu currently serves as associate editors for IFAC Journal of Process Control, Control Engineering Practice, International Journal of Systems Science and MDPI journal Mathematics.