A Knowledge-Based SDSS for Medfly Area-Wide Control: Development, Validation and Effectiveness Evaluation

The aim of this chapter is to describe the motivation to develop a knowledge-based spatial decision support system (KB-SDSS) for medfly control in citrus in Israel, its development approach and procedure, its validation, and the steps towards its assimilation among the zone-managers. Development of the KB-SDSS for medfly control in Israel, also known as MedCila involved four main phases: 1. acquisition of expert and domain knowledge related to the control decision process; 2. identification of the relevant criteria and modeling each criterion and the overall decision making procedure; 3. its integration into a GIS environment; and 4. its performance evaluation by an expert-panel considering four aspects: verification, validation, acceptance and effectiveness. Comparison with data-mining approach exemplifies the effectiveness of the KB approach in this case. Our results show that the MedCila may reduce spraying actions by at least 8%, which is estimated to save ca. 13.3 ton/year of chemicals. Ceratitis capitata; Medfly control, knowledge-based spatial decision support system, Stanford certain factor algebra, expert panel, verification, validation, acceptance, effectiveness.

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