INSTITUTE OF STATISTICAL STUDIES AND RESEARCH, CAIRO UNNERSITY, EGYPT

Abstract

Abstract

Knowledge based expert systems have been used in different fields like medicine, process control etc. Similarly, these systems are also being used in agriculture field in which different tasks from irrigation, planning to harvest are included. Expert System assists people in the making environmentally sound and economically viable farm management decisions through advice. Expert system can also be used as a training tool in agriculture sector because of its structured way of deriving knowledge and its explanation facility. There are some cores areas of agriculture for which such type of systems have been developed. These areas include Pest management, Weed controlling, Fertilization, Farm planning, Agricultural engineering, Crop production, Natural resources conservation, Disorder management, Site evaluation, Variety selection, Marketing and finance management. Expert system (ES) is intelligent software which works in one particular domain. It uses knowledge and inference capability to solve problems. Knowledge residing in knowledge base of expert system consists of domain facts and associated heuristics. This knowledge is collected from human experts. Moreover, one or two experts are not enough for some working areas just like agriculture \\here so many fields are part of one major field. That is why knowledge is gathered from more than one expert and accumulated to software, which is called expert system. As expert system is based upon knowledge, this is known as knowledge based system or intelligent decision support system. Expert system can be integrated with other software or numerical techniques like linear programming model to give numerical results that can be confirming the symbolic output of the expert system. It found out that the integration could serve in predicting the yield given the outputs of the expert system as input to the linear programming models.