With the growth and formation of the river basin for several thousand years, a series of cities were formed along water basin. The activities arising from the upstream and downstream cities such as water intake and wastewater discharge significantly affect the nature of the river. These cities are called "The Basin City". A GIS-based decision support system (DSS) was developed in this paper for water trade management of basin cities in order to investigate water trade mechanisms. Several subsystems are included in the developed DSS, i.e., data-driven subsystem for predicting the change of water quality and water volume which will be used for water quality assessment and pollution control purpose; basin information subsystem; trading information subsystem, a ranking subsystem for water environment management; a information subsystem including various standards, laws, regulations; spatiotemporal relations of water attributes etc. All of these subsystems benefit the sustainable management of cities along the study river and water basin. The GIS-based management of the basin city water environment was a multi-objective and hierarchical comprehensive DSS. The change of basin water resources and the using situation together with the pollution discharge of from cities along the river can be observed visually, intuitively, and rapidly. It is a platform for the basin city water trades and a water resources transaction system. (C) 2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
