DIARES-IPM: a diagnostic advisory rule-based expert system for integrated pest management in Solanaceous crop systems

Abstract

This paper presents a DIagnostic Advisory Rule-based Expert System for Integrated Pest Management (DIARES-IPM) in Solanaceous crops. DIARES-IPM is an operational automatic identification tool that helps non-experts to identify pests (insects, diseases, nutritional deficiencies and beneficial insects) and suggest the appropriate treatments. The objective of this expert system was to serve as a diagnostic, extension and educational tool in vegetable IPM and it includes the most economically important diseases, insects (noxious and beneficial insects) and nutritional deficiencies that affect these crops. All the diagnostic knowledge is contained in an integrated knowledge base. This is of great importance for IPM, in which all the pests are to be taken into account if an appropriate management strategy is to be applied. The methodology can also be applied to other vegetable crops without needing to rewrite the core knowledge base, while the overall system design, with minor changes, could be applicable to pest diagnosis or pest risk assessment in any other agro-ecosystem. To implement DIARES-IPM, EXSYS tool for Windows was used and the knowledge is represented in the linguistic form of IF-THEN rules. The expert system has been evaluated following conventional expert system evaluation methodologies.