AI System for Comparing Irrigation Records with Field Plans

The problem

In day-to-day operations, planned irrigation and recorded flow can diverge. When the irrigation plan, valve status, meter flow, plot, rainfall and maintenance records are scattered across sensors, documents, field records or team systems, issues do not become visible in time.

This fragmented data delays preparation of the irrigation variance report and forces teams to search for supporting evidence again by hand. Before making a decision, the agricultural engineer and irrigation manager must complete missing records and verify each conflict individually.

A common exception is that rainfall or planned maintenance may intentionally delay irrigation. Without this context check, incomplete or incorrect automation could cause unnecessary irrigation or water stress, so no physical or operational action can be applied directly.

What we set out to improve

• Number of verified discrepancies in irrigation records
• Proportion of outputs corrected or rejected by the agricultural engineer and irrigation manager
• Time between the source event and the inspection output

How the system works

1. 01 Define the review scope and the authorised agricultural engineer and irrigation manager roles
2. 02 Retrieve inputs: irrigation plan, valve status, meter flow, plot, rainfall and maintenance records
3. 03 Check source identity, date, calibration or version, and data recency
4. 04 Match planned and recorded events
5. 05 Check rainfall, maintenance and meter status
6. 06 Check for an exception: rainfall or planned maintenance may intentionally delay irrigation
7. 07 Route low-confidence or conflicting records to a separate specialist queue
8. 08 Write the source identity, rule, output and timestamp to the audit trail
9. 09 Have the agricultural engineer and irrigation manager approve, correct, defer or reject the output

Methods we used

• Event reconciliation and plot-level rule checks
• Source, format, timing and required-field checks for the irrigation plan, valve status, meter flow, plot, rainfall and maintenance records
• A missing-data warning instead of an estimate when inputs are incomplete or conflicting
• Separate evaluation of exceptions and the main rule
• Combined retention of the source, rule result, irrigation variance report and human decision

Where people stay involved

Data and security

Access to the irrigation plan, valve status, meter flow, plot, rainfall and maintenance records is limited to the minimum permissions required for the task. Commercial, location and employee information is masked where possible, and only the necessary subset of the raw dataset is passed to the model. Access, outputs and the agricultural engineer's and irrigation manager's decisions are logged; the system is not released to production until the organisation approves the retention period and data location.

Who this suits

Frequently asked questions