PulsExpert: An expert system for the diagnosis and control of diseases in pulse crops

This paper presents design and development of an expert system for the diagnosis and control of diseases in pulse crops (PulsExpert). PulsExpert is an operational automatic diagnostic tool that helps farmers/extension workers to identify diseases of major pulse crops viz., Chickpea, Pigeonpea, Mungbean and Urdbean (highly consumed pulse crops) and suggests the appropriate control measures. Automatic knowledge acquisition system of PulsExpert provides user-friendly interface to the domain experts for entering, storing and structuring the domain specific knowledge. The knowledge base has been designed after examining the type and structure of the knowledge from different sources like literatures, books, databases, farmers, extension workers, etc. For a particular crop, knowledge can be entered by more than one expert using an automatic knowledge acquisition system and system automatically integrates the knowledge to build a consistent knowledge base. The knowledge base of PulsExpert contains up-to-date knowledge about 19 major diseases of pulses appearing right from seedling to maturity. The system provides user-friendly interface to farmers and asks the textual as well as pictorial questions. The order of questions to be asked is decided dynamically depending upon the answers of the farmer. On the basis of answers, PulsExpert diagnosis the pulse crop diseases along with its confidence factor and suggests most appropriate control measures which are composed of cultural practices as well as chemical controls. PulsExpert was evaluated by a team of field farmers and State Agriculture Officers and it was considered good with an average rank of 2.745 by farmers and 2.075 by State Agriculture Officers with a statistic mode ranking 3 in both the cases. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.