Agpest: An efficient rule-based expert system to prevent pest diseases of rice & wheat crops

Agriculture is one of the major sources of income in developing countries like India. Pests are one of the main sources for the degradation of quality and quantity of the major crops such as Rice and Wheat. The lack of knowledge about technical & scientific methods to prevent pest diseases is the main reason for less production of these commodities. This paper presents an architectural framework of an agriculture Expert System and describes the design and development of the rule based expert system for rice and wheat crop pest management. The designed system is intended for the diagnosis of diseases caused by pests in the rice & wheat plants respectively and it also facilitates different components including decision support module with interactive console base user interface for diagnosis on the basis of response(s) of the user made against the queries related to particular disease symptoms. This paper provides a new approach for knowledge representation in expert systems for agricultural domain. The Explanation block (EB) of the system provides the explanation for a particular decision taken by the system. Explanation block gives the clear view of logic followed by kernel of the expert system.