SUDPLAN Scenario Management System Requirements Specification V2

This document has been produced by the consortium of the European Project FP7-247708 Sustainable Urban Development Planner for Climate Change Adaptation (SUDPLAN). It is the second deliverable of Task 3.1 - Requirements Specification, and contains the updated requirements of the second requirements analysis phase and is considered to be the final and stable version of the SUDPLAN requirements.

The purpose of this document is to establish the requirements of the Scenario Management System of SUDPLAN, sometimes referred to herein as the SUDPLAN platform.

In order to understand the high level requirements of SUDPLAN, one must first understand SUDPLAN as a fundamentally interactive system. The entire purpose of the system is to support human decision makers. While this point might seem obvious and not worth mentioning, it is important to understand that many (if not most) decision support systems fail because they fail to focus on the humans who are part of the system.

In SUDPLAN we are determined not to make this mistake. We have focused on the human users of the system as the most important source of information – a perspective described in the literature as user-centred design. The requirements described in the present document derive in great part from a thoughtful and systematic process by which the needs of the users were elicited and transformed into requirements. While some requirements come from other sources, none are more important than those of the users, who are understood to be integral elements of the system. For the system to succeed, the users must succeed. For this reason, SUDPLAN is a user-driven system, and its requirements, as elaborated in the present document, are intimately connected with the anticipated users of its applications.