Zhu Zesheng ,Sun Ling

GIS IMPLEMENTATION OF MANAGEMENT SYSTEM OF AGRICULTURAL RESOURCES

The advanced management system of agricultural resources has been developed in GIS environment as a new means to manage a number of agricultural resources about agricultural production. This paper discusses the basic method for designing and implementing the system. The system includes also other key techniques of information sciences such as expert system and simulation. Otherwise, the system is also a user-friendly decision support system based on ARCVIEW 2.1 and designed to help the managers of agricultural resources sort and rank the resource application. The system includes a number of predefined categories for evaluating the decisions to use the agricultural resource. The work is concerned with the system modeling and integration in GIS environment. The problems of system architecture and O-O design are considered, and a brief description of some key techniques of the system. The system is ideally suited to solving complex and important management decisions about how to use agricultural resource and would seem to have great potential for aiding agricultural resource decision makers. However, both developers and commissioning organizations should be aware of the amount of effort that is required in order to elevate the working prototype to proven, commercially reliable systems. The principles used to establish the system could be applied for any other area in the world where is an appropriate information base and GIS to build advanced agricultural resource management system.


1. INTRODUCTION

Advanced management system of agricultural resources is one of the 

most important tools to implement high efficient management of 

modernization agricultural production and makes more and more 

influence to the production. However, most of early management 

systems of agricultural resources were developed mainly in the 

environment of data base system, which makes the efficient 

management for agricultural resource that includes a lot of geographic 

information become very or extremely difficult problem because of the 

lack of advanced graphic processing function about geographic 

information in those systems. Otherwise, the user interfaces of those 

systems were usually very poor and unsatisfactory, so that they have 

been facing many difficulties in their practical applications. Latterly, 

GIS was used to introduce its function into those systems so as to 

largely improve and increase their performance and function, 

respectively. However, many application examples shown that the 

performance of those improved systems was not still satisfactory in 

most of practical applications. Major reasons resulting in this situation 

can further be discussed as follows.

1)Operation speed and function of various user interfaces designed and 

implemented by each user are not usually satisfactory because of the 

application of some unsuitable programming languages and methods,

2)User must spend a lot of time to integrate data base system, GIS and 

other support systems because of the low efficiency of codes of the 

above complex user interfaces and the lack of suitable framework for 

the integration,

3)It is very difficult in the above environment to fast build and 

implement the system model of complex application with the advanced 

object-oriented technique.

However, our research shown that Esri�s ARCVIEW 2.1 provides a 

very satisfactory GIS environment and framework for redesigning the 

traditional management system of agricultural resources and 

implementing a management system of agricultural resources that has 

total new functions based on ARCVIEW 2.1 environment. This paper 

discusses mainly our new advances and partial achievements in the 

process to design and implement a district-level management system 

of agricultural resources. The main objective of this study is to develop 

a prototype system for implementing the management system of 

agricultural resources in ARCVIEW environment. The study is also 

aimed at providing practical experiences and management tools for 

building larger management system of agricultural resources and 

training managers of some important agricultural resources. The 

remainder of the paper is organized as follows. First, a brief review of 

the layered architecture model relevant to the design and 

implementation of management system of agricultural resources is 

provided. Next, the methods associated with the development and 

implementation of the model are described. Some experiences and 

results from application of ARCVIEW 2.1 with Avenue are presented 

to illustrate how to integrate a complex application system having 

several subsystems. Finally, some important conclusions are offered.



2. ARCHITECTURE MODEL

Although management systems of agricultural resources have been 

widely used in agriculture production for many years, their application 

relevant to GIS in agriculture production is recent, and how to build a 

reasonable architecture model for designing and implementing the 

management systems based on GIS environment has been being a very 

difficult problem, so that the architecture model is rare to date. The 

management system described in this paper utilizes a layered model of 

architecture which involves the seven different layers shown in Fig. 1. 

The model is in practice a 

Layer Model of Agri. Resource 

Management

widely accepted structuring technique. The functions of management 

system of agricultural resources are partitioned into a vertical set of 

layers. Each layer performs a related subset of the functions required 

to exchange information with another similar system which has the 

architecture. It relies on the next lower layer to perform more 

primitive functions and to conceal details of those functions. It 

provides services to the next higher layer. Ideally, the layers should be 

defined so that changes in one layer do not require changes in the 

other layers. Thus, we have decomposed one complex problem about 

how to construct management system of agricultural resources into a 

number of more manageable subproblems. The task of our research 

team was to define a set of layers and the services performed by each 

layer. The partitioning should group functions logically, should have 

enough layers to make each layer manageable small, but should not 

have so many layers that the processing overhead imposed by the 

collection of layers is burdensome. Further, we discuss briefly each of 

the layer. The environment data layer (first layer) provides the 

mechanism for managing the environmental data about the resource 

management, which include the data relevant to land, water, weed, 

crop, tree and other natural resources. While the first layer provides 

only the basic management for environmental natural resources, the 

second layer (weather data layer) attempts to make use of the services 

from the first layer and provides the means to manage the historical 

and current weather data about the agricultural resources. The basic 

service of the production data layer ( the third layer) is to provide the 

management for production data about agricultural resources, which 

includes various data about production tools, materials and facilities. 

The purpose of layer 4 (decision data layer) is to provide a mechanism 

to generate various data to support the decision about agricultural 

resource management. The layer complexity depends on the type of 

service it can get from layer 3. The decision layer provides a 

mechanism for making various decisions for agricultural resource 

management with the help of  a number of decision models. The 

management layer is concerned with the integrated management 

decision for a number of special groups of agricultural resources. Its 

purpose is to define various standard application-oriented management 

decisions. The application layer about application of agricultural 

resource management provides a means for various users or 

application processes to access the management system. This layer 

contains management functions about the application and some useful 

mechanisms to support local and remote applications.



3. ARCHITECTURE IMPLEMENTATION

According to the architecture model, the management system 

implementation can be divided into three subsystems. The first is basic 

resource management subsystem shown in Fig. 2, which encompasses 

the model�s layers 1, 2 and 3. The subsystem is 

Basic management sub-system and 

GIS

primarily intended to provide the "raw" management service of 

agricultural resources which is directly used by an end user and is the 

lack of decision support. Two main components such as GIS 

environment and data base management system support its major 

operation. The second is advanced resource management subsystem 

shown in Fig. 3, which is used to perform an analysis of basic 

management data from the first 

Advanced Management sub-

system

subsystem and to recommend the best basic management decisions or 

strategies for the application subsystem. The management models, 

expert system and simulation models are used to support its major 

operation. The simulation models generate a complete data for each 

basic management decision of the expert system. In general, the expert 

system is capable of integrating the knowledge of several disciplines 

into a single knowledge based system of decision support. The 

properly developed expert system is a powerful tool for providing 

managers or users of agricultural resources with the day-to-day 

decision support need to use or assign those resources. The 

management models in the subsystem are some object-oriented 

programs designed to analyze alternatives over both numeric and non-

numeric decision criteria. According to various different application 

requirements, the programs form the final recommendation for the 

best resource management decision given to an user�s preferences and 

perceptions about the set of management decision. The third is 

application subsystem of resource management shown in Fig. 4, which 

provides a 

Application  sub-system

means for application processes or users to access the management 

system of agricultural resources. The subsystem is composed of three 

classes of models: local application models, which handle various 

services for local users, remote application models, which handle 

various services for remote users, and models for testing system 

functions, which provide for the testing of the system components and 

assist in fault isolation and identification.



4. ARCVIEW INTEGRATION

The above subsystems can be regarded as collections of tools or 

methods that serve a special role in the decision of agricultural 

resource management. Rather than viewing these subsystem as black 

box entities, one can view them as collections of methods that are part 

of the application domain, which is called a real world model of 

resource management. Thus, we can use the real world model as the 

joining tool in systems integration. However, our research and 

experiences shown that ARCVIEW 2.1 provides a very satisfactory 

GIS environment and framework for implementing the integration. 

The object-oriented management model of agricultural resource based 

on the above architecture and ARCVIEW 2.1 is shown in Fig. 5. The 

O-O design does 

Interconnection of sub-

systems

not allow subsystems to communicate directly.  All communication is 

governed by the real world model of the application domain which 

consists of ARCVIEW 2.1 kernel. Subsystems would communicate 

with the real world and not with each other. The advantage to this 

approach was that the management system would not be committed to 

or built around any specific type of subsystem, making the 

management system compatible with more application environments. 

Fig. 6 shows the class 

ARC VIEW�s Real World

hierarchy for real world model based on ARCVIEW 2.1. 

Considerations were given to a design that supports any management 

system of agricultural resources to satisfy various practical application 

requirements. The real world was constructed bottom up, which starts 

with objects that were known to be required for the decision and 

simulation as well as management entity of particular part in the real 

world was the presence of classes that represented collections of 

objects and of multiple inheritance. Our experiences have shown that 

the concept of ARCVIEW kernel is a viable approach to systems 

integration under the object-oriented paradigm. The user and 

manager�s view of the world and its behavior is the focal point of the 

entire management system. All special processing functions provided 

by subsystems such as GIS, simulation models and expert system are 

methods to ARCVIEW real world objects. In the practical 

implementation of the management system, the Microsoft�s VISUAL 

BASIC 4.00 and VISUAL C++ 2.00 as well as Esri�s AVENUE were 

used to implement the object-oriented model in ARCVIEW 

environment with the help of the architecture model. Especially, a 

number of scripts developed by AVENUE plaid very key role during 

integration of the management system, which make the design and 

implementation of some complex user interfaces become very simple. 

This integration process is shown in Fig. 7.

O-O Model for System 

Integration



5. CONCLUSION

The work in this paper described some major advantages of 

management system of agricultural resource designed and 

implemented by our new method. The scientific management of 

agricultural resource will become a very important part of modern 

agricultural production in next century and a new research direction in 

domain of agricultural engineering. The wide application of advanced 

management system of  agricultural resource will reduce the huge loss 

of the resource due to poor management and use of the resource. The 

work to develop more efficient management system of agricultural 

resource will become a future challenge in modern agricultural 

production. However, our success and full experiences had shown that 

our current work and outcomes related to the research of management 

system of agricultural resource based on GIS environment provided a 

satisfactory ground and open a wider research domain for the 

development of future advanced management system of agricultural 

resource.



7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors wish to acknowledge the valuable contributions of other 

members of our research team to the research. They also acknowledge 

funding of the research by China National Foundation of Natural 

Sciences



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Zhu Zesheng
Nanjing Navy Institute of Electronic Engineering
Jiang Pu, Nanjing, JiangSu, 210017, P. R. China
Sun Ling
JiangSu Academy Of Agricultural Sciences
Nanjing, JiangSu, 210014, P. R. China