| Sumario: | [EN] The high amount of energy required for the operation of pressurized irrigation networks, and the increasing electric tariffs over the last years have led researchers to develop new methodologies and strategies focused on reducing the exploitation cost of these networks. Among irrigation networks there are many in which the head of the source node is high enough to deliver water to some takeoffs at the required pressure. For these cases, considerable savings can be obtained by performing the irrigation of the maximum number of takeoffs without pumping during the hours when energy is more expensive. In this work a new methodology was developed for maximizing the volume delivered by gravity during a specific time interval, while guaranteeing a minimum service pressure at each operating takeoff, by setting the instants when each takeoff starts and finishes irrigation. The methodology is based on combining a Genetic Algorithm with the hydraulic simulation of the network using the Epanet toolkit. It was developed in Visual Studio by means of the C# programming language. The optimization was tested on two real cases and it was achieved a volume increase delivered by gravity of around 30% compared to the current situation.
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