CROP MANAGEMENT PLANNING AS A FUZZY AND UNCERTAIN CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION PROBLEM

A crop management plan is a logical and ordered sequence of cultivation operations applied to a crop. Several possible approaches to the crop management planning problem have been considered. One sees the planning task as a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). However, the classical CSP approach presents some important limitations for this specific application. These limitations are due, in particular, to the. imperfection (imprecision and uncertainty) of the available knowledge. Two recent extensions have been made in order to deal rigorously and efficiently with flexible (i.e. imprecise) and uncertain constraints. We have developed a constraint satisfaction solver that incorporates these extensions and we have tested it with a knowledge base that embeds constraints on various responses of a winter wheat crop to cropping and environmental factors.