REFRAME: COMPUTATIONAL SUPPORT FOR THE DECISION MAKING PROCESS

摘要

Decision support in water management involves increasingly elaborate computations. Not only is simulator coupling in vogue, simulation is coming to be embedded within increasingly elaborate analyses. The true computational and, more importantly, cognitive implications of this are not widely appreciated. Traditional approaches to the encapsulation of knowledge in software are supremely unsuited to the tasks we now face in hydroinformatics. We outline a language designed to allow the expression of this class of computations - including simulation, parameter estimation, uncertainty, risk, and decision analysis - in a form which is both efficiently executable and cognitively tractable. An example is provided of the use of the language to express a risk analysis method used by the UK Environment Agency for national-scale flood risk assessment.