Management planning for winter wheat with multiple objectives (1): The BETHA system

Today. farmers have to fulfil the economic. technological and environmental requirements laid down by agro-industries or consumers, or government regulations. This makes designing crop management plans more complex. A tool specific for a wheat crop has therefore been devised: the BETHA system. First, BETHA generates feasible crop management plans from an agronomic model. This agronomic model includes simple relationships that link qualitative and quantitative production to the crop, the crop techniques and climate and soil characteristics, As BETHA is a knowledge-based system, the user can easily modify the agronomic model. BETHA then performs a multiple criteria analysis to classify the crop management plans according to their capacity to follow the competing requirements defined by the user, A non-totally compensatory method based on agreement and discordance principles has been used because these criteria may be very different and cannot be directly aggregated. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.