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