Contact Admin. Rural communities are often built on agriculture and livestock. To more efficiently manage and coordinate the use of a scarce water supply in agricultural communities, a team from the Polytechnic University of Madrid proposed a blockchain-based automatic water control system. Rules are paramount for the proposed system and must be established upfront by the community of users.
In a prosumer environment, users establish regulations for their individual and community water quotas. Those regulations are then taken by a transformation engine and are built, compiled, and deployed. A simple infrastructure of common valves and pumps are complemented by interactive electronic devices and allow a SmartContract to oversee decision-making and control algorithms, as well as the state of the water sources.
The water itself is held in a tank and measured using popular commercial systems. No known proposal for an irrigation community of individual users has been made with these systems, meaning the systems needed to be altered for more control and trust. The architecture of the proposed system consists of three main parts: the mobile prosumer environment, the blockchain networks, and the electronic infrastructure for control and measurement.
An illustration of the architecture can be seen below in Figure 1. To test the proposed system, the team implemented a prototype. The main function the team wanted to test was response time, and as can be seen in Figure 2, response time was very consistent with up to 40 irrigation scenarios being executed.
Considering the environment in which the system needs to work, the team believes the response times were acceptable. However, the team was able to prove that a blockchain-based water control system can be a trustworthy solution for irrigation communities battling a scarce water supply. Moving forward, they will continue to refine their system and determine how it can best be scaled. The blockchain technology is very effective in the exchange of irrigation rights between users.
