A distributed robust optimization model based on water-food-energy nexus for irrigated agricultural sustainable development

Abstract

Sustainable agricultural development covers all aspects of agricultural production involving the water-food-energy nexus (WFEN) and considers the effects of agricultural activities on society, economy and ecology. Multi-objective optimization models play an important role in making tradeoff among multiple interests of stakeholders.Aimed at canal-based irrigated agricultural areas, water allocation highly depends on canal distribution, and the spatial location of irrigation regions determines their water-intake order, which usually induces serious water allocation inequality. The social, economic and ecological problems resulting from water inequality would deteriorate without intervention and seriously impact sustainable development. Thus, optimization models must consider water use equity, water-intake order as well as water equilibrium simultaneously. However, this will greatly increase computational efforts and solution difficulty. The problem becomes worse when uncertain factors are involved.In order to overcome these difficulties, a distributed multi-objective uncertain optimization model was established to help develop comprehensive strategies for agricultural sustainability. A novel robust solution method was proposed to offer an efficient way to handle stochastic and fuzzy uncertainties from the perspective of feasibility and optimality robustness. Finally, a case study was conducted to demonstrate the practical application of the developed model. The results offer managers insights on agricultural sustainable development.