Jeonbuk National University (JBNU) doctoral student Cheong Ri-gwang (Department of Rural Construction Engineering, supervised by Professor Jang Tae-il) recently received the Minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs Award (Grand Prize) at the 2025 Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers Annual Meeting (Student Competition) held in Jeju.

Cheong’s research, titled "Development of an APSIM–Machine Learning Integrated Framework for Winter Wheat Water Management," proposed a new integrated management framework that incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) analysis into the physics-based crop model APSIM.

The study was highly rated for presenting a water-management paradigm that can increase winter wheat productivity and protein content while enabling real-time decision-making and the formulation of management strategies to respond to climate change.

In particular, attention was drawn to the implementation of a real-time decision-making system that integrates APSIM-based forecasting with AI learning functions, offering a practical approach to maximizing water-management efficiency in complex agricultural environments. The research team expects this technology to be extendable to climate-change scenario analysis, field-scale water-balance assessment, and automated irrigation systems for smart farms.

JBNU stated that this achievement will serve as an opportunity to enhance competitiveness in data-driven precision agriculture technologies and climate-adaptive crop management research, and represents a meaningful result that further strengthens the university’s standing in the field of field-based smart agriculture.