Teapest: An Expert System for Insect Pest Management in Tea

Tea is one of the major crops of India and is grown over a large area. The loss of crop due to insects is one of theproductivity barriers. Insect pest management is a challenging problem to tea cultivators. Proper identification of the insectpests, selection of chemical pesticides and their discriminate use, need human expertise, experience, and judgment. But,sufficient number of competent human experts are not available to cover the large area. To mitigate the lack of humanexpertise and assist the existing experts for improved decisionmaking, an expert system for insect pest management wouldbe useful. This article presents a rulebased, objectoriented expert system for insect pest management in tea code namedTEAPEST. The system identifies major insect pests of tea and suggests appropriate control measures. TEAPEST showsgood performance as evident from its performance evaluation.