بررسی ادبیات سیستماتیک سیستمهای اطلاعات مدیریت مزرعه داری
Abstract
1- Introduction
2- Related work
3- Review protocol
4- Results
5- Discussion
6- Conclusion
References
Abstract
Various Farm Management Information Systems (FMISs) have been developed to support the management of the farm businesses. These FMISs typically support the different domains of the agricultural sector, such as arable and dairy farming; and include different set of features, such as crop, field, and financial management. These FMISs also have to deal with diverse obstacles during their development and adoption, such as lack of standardized data, cost and usability. Though several papers have been published in the past several years on this topic, there has been no explicit attempt to systematically review these papers to identify and characterize the features and obstacles. The objective of this study is to identify and describe the state-of-the-art of FMISs and as such pave the way for further research and development of FMISs. We applied a systematic literature review protocol in which we included the literature published from 2008 to 2018. We found 1048 papers of which 38 papers were selected as primary studies that we analyzed further in detail. From the detailed analysis, we identified 81 unique FMIS features and 51 unique obstacles of FMISs. We have systematically ranked the identified features and obstacles and describe the key associated aspects. These aspects include the agricultural domains, modeling approaches, delivery models, and identified stakeholders.
Introduction
A Farm Management Information System (FMIS) or, in short, a Farm Management System (FMS) is developed to support the management of diverse farm enterprises. An FMIS is essentially a Management Information System (MIS) for the agriculture sector. According to Waston et al. (1991) an MIS is defined as: “an organizational method of providing past, present and projected information related to internal operations and external intelligence.” An MIS supports decision making by providing timely information about the planning, control and operational functions of an organization (Waston et al., 1991). By the same token, an FMIS supports timely decision making within farm enterprises. Over the years MISs for agriculture have developed from simple farm data recording systems into extensive FMISs (Fountas et al., 2015a). Sørensen et al. (2010) defines an FMIS as: “a planned system for the collecting, processing, storing and disseminating of data in the form of information needed to carry out the operations functions of the farm.” FMISs can support decision making by finding the best practices for farm management (Fountas et al., 2015a). The main purpose of current FMISs is to reduce the production costs, maintain high product quality and safety, and to comply with agricultural standards (Fountas et al., 2015a). In general, an FMIS supports decision making and helps with keeping track of the current business processes to maximize the profit of a farm. To understand FMISs, it is important to know which features they support, which obstacles are encountered in developing and using FMISs, and the context in which the FMISs are used. In this paper, we define features of an FMIS as user-visible characteristics. All features together constitute to what we refer as an FMIS. Widely supported features of FMISs include Feed management, Financial management, and Labour management (Allen and Wolfert, 2011). Developers of FMISs face many obstacles in providing the desired FMIS features. Likewise, a substandard FMIS creates a number of obstacles for end users. In this study, we regard an obstacle in general terms as any problem related to the development or the use of FMISs. Since the adoption of FMISs is directly related not only to the features provided but also to the obstacles faced, an SLR of FMISs also needs to consider studies that identify and describe the current obstacles and open issues of FMISs.