A Collaborative Multi-agent System for Oil Palm Pests and Diseases Global Situation Awareness

Many researchers have been studying biological and managerial challenges of oil palm trees plantation and production. Oil Palm Pests and Diseases (OPPD), such as Oryctes rhinoceros beetles and Ganoderma are most prominent among the natural factors that deter the growth of oil palm trees and yields. Some of these OPPD have the properties of fast expansion and dynamic distribution making the monitoring of the OPPD a complex problem. Consequently, this paper proposes a risk assessment framework for Oil Palm Pests and Diseases Global Situation Awareness (OPPD-GSA). The OPPD-GSA framework operates by a teamwork of humans and software agents in a Collaborative Multi-agent System (CMAS). The overall system is implemented and experimentally tested in monitoring and controlling a sample OPPD observation data of Oryctes rhinoceros beetles and Ganoderma within five areas in Malaysia. The test results confirm that the OPPD-GSA application is able to process the OPPD monitoring tasks in real-time and handle Geo-located visualization data.