NORTH SLOPE DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM: WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT IN SUPPORT OF OIL AND GAS EXPLORATION IN ALASKA

摘要

The North Slope Decision Support System (NSDSS) is currently under development as a technology in support of oil and gas exploration and development on Alaska's North Slope. Major modules of the DSS include information systems, natural system models, and planning/management functions. Development of the DSS is a collaborative effort of academic and industry personnel with significant stakeholder involvement from local, state, and federal government, private energy companies, and non-governmental organizations. Ice roads and pads provide a cost-effective means of oil and gas exploration with minimal impact to the sensitive underlying tundra. Consequently, these ice structures have become integral to oil and gas exploration activities on the North Slope. Their widespread use represents a challenge to water resource managers, however, due to the large volume of water required to construct and maintain them. Crucial questions on water balance and ecosystem impact must be considered in the state regulatory process that permits construction of these ice structures. The NSDSS will consist of 1) a service oriented architecture (SOA) based cyberinfrastructure composed of a node-link network of distributed databases, 2) a desktop-based workbench tool, and 3) a web browser tool. The cyberinfrastructure will contain databases of GIS data, time series of meteorological and hydrological data at points and as gridded products, and papers describing scientific findings relevant to the North Slope. Using the workbench, users will be able to assess the impact of proposed management alternatives vis-a-vis important stakeholder criteria by simulating the implemented alternative in an integrated model of the physical systems on the North Slope. The web browser will provide an intuitive view of the North Slope, the data available, and indeed the data gaps to be filled. One important workbench application is multi-objective planning for ice road routes. Pareto-optimal route alternatives are determined for cost, travel time, completion date, and other objectives. Spatial search domains are built using GIS layers for water availability, vegetation and wildlife sensitivity, topography, etc., and heuristic optimization is utilized with novel algorithms for graph pre- and post-processing to improve solution efficiency. Outputs from the planning routines allow decision makers to understand tradeoff relationships among objectives.