Developing a decision support system for integrated production in agriculture

Recent approaches in building decision support systems (DSS) for agriculture, and more generally for environmental problems, tend to adopt a “systemic” approach. That is to say, a problem is analyzed in terms of all the knowledge, the data and the responsibilities it depends on. So, the proposed applications aim to be integrated in larger information systems by exploiting the fact that different organizations may manage information sources and resources that are relevant to problem solutions. The paper focuses on design issues faced during the development of a DSS to be used by technicians of the advisory service performing pest management according to an integrated production approach. Designing this type of system requires analyzing two main dimensions of complexity basically: the organizational dimension dealing with all the dependencies between the domain stakeholders, and the technical dimension concerning the study of natural plant protection techniques. These considerations motivate the choice of an agent-oriented methodology for software development. The methodology, called Tropos, plays a central role in early requirement analysis and allows deriving a system’s functional and non-functional requirements from a deep understanding of the domain stakeholders’ goals and of their dependencies. Two components of the system have been implemented using web technologies and they are currently under evaluation.