Scott Thomasma

NED-2: an agent-based decision support system for forest ecosystem management

Abstract Decision making for forest ecosystem management can include the use of a wide variety of modeling tools. These tools include vegetation growth models, wildlife models, silvicultural models, GIS, and visualization tools. NED-2 is a robust, intelligent, goal-driven decision support system that integrates tools in each of these categories. NED-2 uses a blackboard architecture and a set of semi-autonomous agents to manage these tools for the user. The blackboard integrates a Microsoft Access database and Prolog clauses, and the agents are implemented in Prolog. A graphical user interface written in Visual C++ provides powerful inventory analysis tools, dialogs for selecting timber, water, ecological, wildlife, and visual goals, and dialogs for defining treatments and building prescriptive management plans. Users can simulate management plans and perform goal analysis on different views of the management unit, where a view is determined by a management plan and a point in time. Prolog agents use growth and yield models to simulate management plans, perform goal analyses on user-specified views of the management unit, display results of plan simulation using GIS tools, and generate hypertext documents containing the results of such analysis. Individual agents use metaknowledge to set up and run external simulation models, to load rule-based models and perform inference, to set up and execute external GIS and visualization systems, and to generate hypertext reports as needed, relieving the user from performing all these tasks.

NED-1: integrated analyses for forest stewardship decisions

NED is a collective term for a set of software intended to help resource managers develop goals, assess current and potential conditions, and produce sustainable management plans for forest properties. The software tools are being developed by the USDA Forest Service, Northeastern and Southern Research Stations, in cooperation with many other collaborators. NED-1 is a Windows-based program that helps analyze forest inventory data from the perspective of various resources on management areas as large as several thousand hectares. Resources addressed include visual quality, ecology, forest health, timber, water, and wildlife. NED-1 evaluates the degree to which an individual stand or an entire management unit may provide the conditions required to accomplish specific goals. NED-1 users select from a variety of reports, including tabular data summaries, general narratives, and goal-specific analyses. An extensive hypertext system provides information about the resource goals, the desired conditions that support achieving those goals, and related data used to analyze the actual condition of the forest, as well as detailed information about the program itself and the rules and formulas used to produce the analyses. The software is constructed in C++ using an application framework; the inferencing component that handles the rule bases uses Prolog.

NED-2 User's Guide

This is the users guide for NED-2, which is the latest version of NED, a forest ecosystem management decision support system. This software is part of a family of software products intended to help resource managers develop goals, assess current and future conditions, and produce sustainable management plans for forest properties. Designed for stand-alone Windows-based personal computers, NED-2 integrates a variety of forest management tools into a single environment. These tools include databases, growth and yield models, wildlife models, geographic information systems (GIS), visualization tools, and others. This users guide provides guidance for use of the software and a basic introduction to the principles and calculations used in NED-2. A reference guide with more detailed explanations of the models, equations, and rules that underlie the software is available separately http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/40931/. The NED-2 software and related documentation may be downloaded from http://nrs.fs.fed.us/tools/ned/products/ned2/.

PROLOG/RDBMS Integration in the NED Intelligent Information System

NED-2 is a software system in development by the USDA Forest Service to facilitate ecosystem management. Using PROLOG knowledge bases and inference engines, NED-2 evaluates forest inventories to determine the degree to which they satisfy a set of predefined goals. By integrating third-party simulation and visualization packages, NED-2 allows the user to plan, predict, and assess forest treatment scenarios.

NED-2 reference guide

This is the reference guide for NED-2, which is the latest version of NED, a forest ecosystem management decision support system. This software is part of a family of software products intended to help resource managers develop goals, assess current and future conditions, and produce sustainable management plans for forest properties. Designed for stand-alone Windows-based personal computers, NED-2 integrates a variety of forest management tools into a single environment. These tools include databases, growth and yield models, wildlife models, geographic information systems (GIS), visualization tools, and others. The software is distributed with an online help system and a users guide http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/39537/. This reference guide provides more detailed explanations of the models, equations, and rules that underlie the software. NED-2 software can be downloaded from http://nrs.fs.fed.us/tools/ned/products/ned2/.

The NED IIS Project - Forest Ecosystem Management

For many years we have held to the notion that an Intelligent Information System (IIS) is composed of a unified knowledge base, database, and model base. The main idea behind this notion is the transparent processing of user queries. The system is responsible for “deciding” which information sources to access in order to fulfil a query regardless of whether this involves a data retrieval, an inference, a computational method, a problem solving module, or some combination of these. The NED IIS project is an effort to develop a robust, intelligent, goal-driven forest ecosystem management system to help forest managers plan and achieve wildlife, ecological, water, landscape, and timber goals. NED, using a blackboard architecture dominated by semi autonomous intelligent agents, integrates a core database, domain knowledge, meta-knowledge, and a GUI with external (possibly distributed) legacy and special purpose (heterogeneous) information sources. The current version of NED is NED-2. NED-2 is still under construction, however a prototype incorporating the major components of the architecture has been completed and demonstrated.

Forest ecosystem management via the NED intelligent information system

We view an Intelligent Information System (IIS) as composed of a unified knowledge base, database, and model base. This allows an IIS to provide responses to user queries regardless of whether the query process involves a data retrieval, an inference, a computational method, a problem solving module, or some combination of these. The unified integration of these components in a distributed environment for forest ecosystem management is the focus of our continuing research.