InTheMED D6.1 Report on the Development of the Innovative DSS Tool

The current document, Deliverable D6.1, is part of Task 6.1 “Initial development and testing of an innovative Decision Support System” (Lead TUC, participants: UPV, UFZ, IST-ID, CERTE and BU), (Month 1 – Month 18) of InTheMED PRIMA project. The aim of D6.1 is to describe the operation of the algorithm that has been developed and will be applied to enable the decision support system (DSS), as well as to present the results of the methodology applied for the Tympaki study area. The DSS will aid groundwater managers in the sustainable management of groundwater resources taking into consideration multiple criteria: socio-economic and environmental. The algorithm is based on the multi-criteria optimization approach, thus meaning the formation of more than one objective function. These objective functions refer to the respective criteria: optimum socio-economic management, optimum environmental management in terms of groundwater quantity and optimum environmental management in terms of groundwater quality. Since optimization processes are usually applied within iterative simulation runs of the study area model, they constitute a time-demanding procedure. Along with the non-linear nature of the problem, the model complexity and time needed are increased. Therefore, the focus has been given to efforts to overcome these difficulties, in order to provide the model with as much automation as possible. The DSS will be in line with a database from which it can retrieve meteorological and hydrological data. The database is developed to function along with the DSS algorithm and its set-up is also described in the current document.