Designing a Multi-Agent System for Integrated Protection in Agriculture

Integrated Protection (IP) in agriculture consists of a set of practices aimed at favoring the set up of a development model characterized by a reduced environmental impact. The application of IP practices in plant disease management by growers and agronomists requires both specialistic skills, historical data and information on chemicals and on low impact techniques for pest management. These sources of information and knowledge are distributed among different actors in the agriculture production system. Recent approaches in developing decision support systems for agriculture, and more generally for environmental problems management, tend to adopt a “systemic” approach. That is to say a problem is considered for its dependencies to different skills and responsibilities, and the proposed applications aim to be integrated in larger information systems. So basically, two main dimensions of complexity have to be considered while analyzing the problem: the organizational dimension dealing with all the dependencies between the domain stakeholders, and the technical dimension concerning the study of natural plant protection techniques. These considerations motivates our choice of using an agent-oriented methodology for software development in designing a multi-agent system at support of apple growers and technicians of the advisory service. The methodology, called Tropos, gives a central role to early requirements analysis and allows to derive system functional and non-functional requirements from a deep understanding of the domain stakeholders goals and of their dependencies.