GUIDING OBJECT-ORIENTED DESIGN VIA THE KNOWLEDGE LEVEL ARCHITECTURE -THE IRRIGATED WHEAT TESTBED

In this paper, we detail our current work on a crop management system for irrigated wheat in Egypt. The goal of our work is to develop a sys tem that will address all aspects of crop management including varieta l selection, planting/harvest date selection, sowing parameters decisi ons, insect/disease/weed identification and remediation, and irrigatio n/fertilization management. The approach we take to solve this problem is the Generic Task Approach to expert systems development pioneered by Chandrasekaran et al. [1]. By using the Generic Task (GT) approach, we set out to model the behavior of an expert in wheat crop managemen t. To accomplish this goal, the GT approach builds on top of the objec t-oriented methodology and acts as a guiding overlay for analyzing kno wledge intensive problems, such as wheat crop management. As a multi-t ask problem, wheat crop management provides a testbed for the ideas of a Knowledge Level Architecture introduced by Sticklen. The Knowledge Level Architecture (KLA) provides a means of understanding large syste ms in terms of cooperating subagents. This paper describes the GT and KLA methodologies, focusing on the support they afford to the descript ion and understanding of knowledge-based systems from an object-orient ed perspective.