DSS-large rivers: developing a DSS under changing societal requirements

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Abstract

This article discusses the development process of a decision support system for river management, named DSS-Large Rivers. It focuses on the difficulties encountered during system development with respect to (1) changing opinions in society on the nature of measures to be assessed, (2) changes in IT-technology and (3) different views of the various end user organisations.

DSS-Large Rivers is targeted at flood management by way of river landscape planning, a hot issue in the lower reaches of the Rhine and Meuse river. Since 1995, various decision support systems have been developed to assess this issue. After a short historical overview, the need for a new DSS will be discussed, followed by a description of the process to obtain functional requirements. The paper elaborates on the design and implementation process, paying attention to the difficulty to match changing end user opinions within rather fixed project conditions. A number of lessons have been drawn, both on the development of a DSS within a changing society, and on the technical design and implementation process.

Section snippets

Background and objective

Decision support systems (DSS-s) have been used for river landscape planning and management in the Netherlands since 1995 (see Table 1). For the second time in two years, a severe threat of floods occurred along the Rhine branches and the river Meuse, and it became clear that rigorous measures would be required to prevent similar occasions in the future. The first tools were composed of a basic 1D-hydraulic model to describe the water movement, a concept introduced by Nieuwkamer (1995) to

Historical context

Influenced by the negative public reaction on dike heightening projects, innovative ideas by NGO’s––such as World Wildlife Fund––to restore the ecosystem in the river area (De Bruin et al., 1987; WL and Grontmij, 1994), the near-flood events in 1995, and the idea that climate change would result in more extreme flood events (Middelkoop et al., 2001), the Dutch government changed their opinion on the way forward to deal with river floods in the future. They replaced the common policy of dike

Functionality, design and implementation

As a wide range of desired functionality is available in existing instruments, but not integrated in one instrument, the Global Functional and Technical designs were based on taking up existing components from various systems and integrating them into one system for both 1D and 2D river-computations.

Given the availability of those existing software components, it was also foreseen that this development effort would mainly be an integration and re-factoring effort. Aiming at a Rapid Application

Experiences during the development

In this section we come back on the interviews that stood at the base of the development of DSS-Large Rivers, and evaluate how they have (or have not) been incorporated in the DSS. Most of these findings are derived after the introduction of the system at the Regional Directorates East Netherlands and Limburg.

While the end-user organisations were known from the beginning, the intended users were unknown until in turned out that handling the system requires quite some technological and

Lessons learnt

Looking back on the development track, a few remarks can be made. Some of them are dealing with technological development aspects, others are dealing with human or social conditions.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank M. Taal for sharing with us his experiences with the use of preliminary versions of DSS-Large Rivers.

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