A knowledge-based intelligent electronic commerce system for selling agricultural products

This paper presents a knowledge-based intelligent e-commerce system for selling agricultural products. The KIES system not only provides agricultural products sales, financial analysis and sales forecasting, but also provides feasible solutions or actions based on the results of rule-based reasoning. The intelligent system integrates a database, a rule base and a model base to create a tool of which managers can use to deal with decision-making problems via the Internet. Rules in the rule base are explained in detail to illustrate the processes of reasoning. Also, an automatic and practical inference engine that provides monitoring and controlling a verity of processes is presented to show how the system can deal with knowledge management. In order to obtain more profits and manage future change, artificial neural network models in the model base have been developed and compared for demand forecasting. Finally, for offering convenient delivery and user-friendly services to customers, an e-map combined with a GPS is used. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.