Development of Intelligent Decision Support System for Crop Management

Key points to effective decision making assistance are helping decision-makers understand their decisions and develop the insight necessary for action. Such assistance must recognize and break through the ignorance that is often the primary source of decision-making difficulty. Decision analysis as tool for formal decision making methodology is employed to assist decision-makers facing difficult decisions. This discipline involves applying a decision theory to real decisions. The primary role of decision analysis is to focus decision-makers’ attention on important aspects of the decision in order to guide them toward a simpler and more effective formulation of decision at hand. Influence diagrams are used to clearly and concisely represent decision problems. Since influence diagrams naturally lend themselves to being generated automatically, they become the best choice for the representation of decision problem models in intelligent decision systems. An intelligent decision system was developed as a means for providing automated decision analysis assistance in crop management practices. The implementation of the analysis of classes of decisions deploying expert systems technology was aimed at providing decision analysis the guidance to the user and to deliver domain knowledge. The intelligent decision system offers a wide range of realistic possibilities for assistance in perennial crops management. The system was applied to solve problems faced by rice farmers desiring to achieve maximum yields in choosing the proper crop management strategies in view of diseases, pests and water management problems.