A Predictive Fuzzy Expert System for Crop Disease Diagnostic and Decision Support

Abstract

Soybean accounts for 38% of the total oilseed production in India, and around 50% of the total oilseed production in Kharif season. This crop has shown tremendous growth over the last four decades with an average national yield of 1264 kg/hectare. Currently, soybean is severely attacked by more than 10 major diseases. Yield losses due to different diseases ranges from 20 to 100%. Timely detection of soybean crop disease would help farmers save their money, effort, and crop from being destroyed. This chapter presents a case study on the development of a decision support system for prediction of soybean crop disease severity. The outcome of this system will aid farmers to decide the extent of disease treatment to be employed. Such predictions make use of human involvement, and thus are a source of ambiguities. To deal with such ambiguities in decision making, this decision support system uses fuzzy inference method based on triangular fuzzy sets.