CommonKADS model framework for web based agricultural Decision Support System.

Abstract

Increased demand of farm productions and depleting natural resources compelled the agriculture community to enhance the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in various farming processes. Agricultural Decision Support System (DSS) proved useful in this regard as the agricultural systems are complex and partially known. The majority of available Agricultural DSSs are either crop or task specific. There are very less endeavors found in the direction of comprehensive DSS. The specific DSSs mainly developed with rule based or knowledge transfer based approach. These methodologies lack the ability to scale up and to support the development of large DSS. Modeling approaches are more suitable than so called transfer approaches for large and inclusive DSS. Unfortunately, it is found that that the model based knowledge engineering approach is not much utilized for the development of Agricultural DSS. The modeling approach to construct Knowledge Base Systems (KBS) becomes well accepted among the Knowledge Engineering (KE) communities due to its modular structure and ability to break down the knowledge engineering problem into smaller tasks. Modeling approach for the development of DSS offers the broad idea of structure and modules of the support system before hand. There are many modeling frameworks proposed and subsequently used by the KE communities. CommonKADS is one of the popular modeling frameworks for KBS. The paper presents the organization, agent, task, communication, knowledge and design models based on CommonKADS approach for development of scalable, broad and practically usable agricultural DSS. A web based DSS developed with multi agent CommonKADS modeling approach. The system offers decision support for irrigation scheduling and weather based disease forecasting for the popular crops of India. The proposed framework along with the required expert knowledge, provide necessary platform on which the larger DSS can built for any crop of given locations.