Environmental Decision Support: a Distributed Artificial Intelligence Approach

摘要

Decision making in any environmental domain is a complex and demandingactivity, justifying the development of dedicated decision support systems. Everydecision is confronted with a large variety and amount of constraints to satisfy aswell as contradictory interests that must be sensibly accommodated.The first stage of a project evaluation is its submission to the relevant group of public(and private) agencies. The individual role of each agency is to verify, withinits domain of competence, the fulfilment of the set of applicable regulations. Thescope of the involved agencies is wide and ranges from evaluation abilities on thetechnical or economical domains to evaluation competences on the environmentalor social areas.The second project evaluation stage involves the gathering of the recommendationsof the individual agencies and their justified merge to produce the final conclusion.The incorporation and accommodation of the consulted agencies opinionsis of extreme importance: opinions may not only differ, but can be interdependent,complementary, irreconcilable or, simply, independent. The definition ofadequate methodologies to sensibly merge, whenever possible, the existing perspectiveswhile preserving the overall legality of the system, will lead to the makingof sound justified decisions.The proposed Environmental Decision Support System models the project evaluationactivity and aims to assist developers in the selection of adequate locationsfor their projects, guaranteeing their compliance with the applicable regulations.