Crafting development strategies for diverse villages: leveraging knowledge from past experiences

This study considers a village – the basic unit of a rural area – as the subject of knowledge management to enhance the efficiency of reusing experience from similar cases and improve the lack of intellectual support in the majority of underdeveloped rural areas. It dynamically assesses the evolutionary direction and pace of village development based on the developmental stage, state, and potential. Combining intelligent decision support systems with case-based reasoning, a dynamic intervention decision system of village development is developed. The results show that (1) the interactive modes among elements of the village development system have a significant influence on the direction and pace of village development. For villages in a period of decline, enhancing the life function can reverse the system's evolutionary direction. For villages in a stagnation or growth period, bolstering the productive function can accelerate the system's evolutionary pace. (2) Knowledge management of numerous successful cases needs to respond to the heterogeneity of villages, integrating compromise strategies into case retrieval and matching mechanisms to improve the practicality of the decision-making system. (3) The dynamic intervention decision system of village development can realise the intelligent recommendation of village development strategies.