Information Management System for Regional Agriculture Research and Development Center Bandarawela.

Abstract

Regional Agriculture Research and Development Center (RARDC), Bandarawela was established in 1972 to serve the farming community. The centre functions under the purview of Horticultural Crop Research and Development Institute (HORDI), Gannoruwa. RARDC provides help in technical needs of the farming community. The main objective of the centre is to generate and disseminate cost effective and eco-friendly technology to increase production of vegetables, fruits, Root and tuber crops and flower crops. For the time being RARDC was using a manual file system for manage their day to day operations, as a result their clients and the management was facing problems such as being late to get their work done, information not being reliable and accurate and unavailability of timely reports and information to make decisions .The Information Management System (IMS) was built to overcome these problems. The system facilitates National Soil Testing program in issuing the soil recommendations for the farmers, handle Inventories of the Laboratory chemicals in main stock and five laboratories, make predictions on Rooted stem cutting projects as well as handling the information regarding the Pathology and Entomology division in disease identification tests and pesticides suitability tests. The Object Oriented techniques were used for the whole system and Unified Modeling Language was used for requirement analysis and design. The MVC architecture was used in designing and the development was done by using Rational Unified Process (RUP) model. As the system is mostly been developed using open source software and tools, sever-side scripting language Hypertext pre-processor (PHP) was used to build the system. Apache was the server and MySQL was used to handle databases. Together XAMAPP was used to build the system. The new system has been developed to overcome the problems with the existing system and make the center operations more effective and efficient.