THE INTEGRATED SOUTHERN PINE-BEETLE EXPERT SYSTEM - ISPBEX
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abstract
The Integrated Southern Pine Beetle Expert System (ISPBEX) was developed to address the fundamental issue of pest management: how to use existing and forthcoming information for the purposes of problem solving and decision making. In this article, we define the problem of southern pine beetle management, recount the history of ISPBEX development, examine the structure and function of the implemented version of ISPBEX, and describe the knowledge system environment approach that is being used in development of the next version of the system. ISPBEX is a task-oriented knowledge-based system. It considers three aspects of integrated pest management : suppression, prevention, and utilization. These subject areas are represented as modules in ISPBEX. Each module contains specific advisors. Major emphasis has been placed on the suppression module which consists of five advisors that deal with treatments, presuppression economic evaluation, postsuppression economic evaluation, infestation forecasting, and project budgeting. The treatment advisor was Beta tested during 1989. A new version of ISPBEX is currently under development. It is an implementation of the Knowledge System Environment (KSE) concept. This new system will provide for knowledge-based interpretation of each of the different types of information and will include a facility for analysis and display of spatially referenced data. 1991.
