Chapter Eight Intelligent Environmental Decision Support Systems

The goal of this chapter is to analyse major challenges in the development of Intelligent Environmental Decision Support Systems (IEDSS), to review some possible approaches and techniques to cope with them, and to study new trends for future research in the IEDSS field. IEDSS are the envisioned new tools to cope with the inherent complexity of environmental problems. Other traditional computational approaches do not seem to be flexible and capable enough to successfully handle complex real-world environmental problems. Major identified challenges are uncertainty management, temporal reasoning, spatial reasoning and evaluation and benchmarking of IEDSS. These challenges are really cutting edge tasks to be solved for a successful application of IEDSS. In this chapter, after analysing the complexity of environmental problems and the architecture and development procedure of IEDSS, the four challenges are studied. The most common approaches for uncertainty management are identified and outlined. The main issues needed to be addressed by uncertainty models are enumerated. IEDSS must take into account the spatial relationships between the environmental goal area and the nearby environmental areas, and the temporal relationships between the current state and the past states of the environmental system to formulate accurate and reliable assertions to be used within the diagnosis/decision-support/planning process. Last, a crucial issue is the evaluation of the reliability and safety of the decisions proposed by an IEDSS. The evaluation of an IEDSS is still an open problem and no clear and well-established strategies have emerged. In this chapter, a general evaluation framework is proposed as a first step to address this issue. Finally, some open research lines regarding IEDSS development are outlined.