iAgri - An Agent based agricultural information provision

Abstract

Agriculture has become one of the most important areas of the world with the current food crisis. But, still there is lack of technological aid that can be assisted to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the agricultural sector. To properly manage the whole process, there is a need for expertise knowledge and a proper communication channel between stakeholders. Nevertheless there is no fully fledged mechanism between farmers and agricultural experts to interact and share the knowledge effectively. This system is an effort to solve the problem of deriving information from scattered and distributed sources. As the solution, an Agricultural Value Chain Management system based on agent technology has been implemented to provide common space for improving the transparency of information by centralizing disseminated agricultural expert information whenever it's needed to the farmers. The system divides agricultural value chain in to 6 stages called Deciding, Seeding, Preparing and Planting, Growing, Harvesting and Selling. The necessary information needs are identified at the each stage by the system and the information is derived from the various agricultural information sources using agents. Then the most suitable information is provided according to the crop and the value chain stage of the crop via a multi agent system.