Expert system for the management of insect-pests in pulse crops

The paper describes the design, development and implementation of a specialized system for the management of insect-pests in pulse crops. It is a web-based system that facilitate “farmers/extension workers” to diagnose insect-pests of major pulse crops viz., Chickpea, Pigeonpea, Mungbean and Urdbean (highly consumed pulse crops) and recommends the suitable treatments. Knowledge acquisition sub - system of the system offers online interface for entering, storing and structuring the domain specific knowledge to the domain experts. This paper also presents a methodology to develop an integrated knowledge base which combines the knowledge fed by the multiple experts in the framework of knowledge. The system holds an integrated knowledge base that incorporates information for the diagnosing of 20 major insect-pests of pulses emerging right from seedling to ripening. The presented work provides user-friendly interface that is able to asks the textual as well as pictographic symptoms in the outline form of multiple-choice questionnaire. Based on given answers, system identifies the pulse crop insect-pests along with its confidence factor and recommends most suitable treatments. The system´s performance was found good and comparison between recommendations of human experts and system itself showed 92% agreement.