ODESSEI: Open architecture Decision Support System for sustainable water resources planning

The ODESSEI system, created under the Eureka EU487 project, is a combined Decision Support System (DSS) and Geographic Information System (GIS) designed to fulfil the requirements of sustainable river basin planning and management. The system integrates a sophisticated group of models, a database, a GIS and an expert system with a user-friendly graphical interface. The GIS, an extensively re-written version of GRASS, has two fundamental functions: to support the spatial dimension of all the data involved and to generate new information by processing and overlapping the available one. Following the needs for a holistic approach to water resources planning and to the assessment of the environmental impact, a set of models (rainfall-runoff, 1D/2D flood routing, soil erosion, in-stream water quality, groundwater flow and quality, environmental impact, etc.) are all connected through the geo-referenced data in such a way that the output of one model can be used as an input for the next one. Aiming at its most productive use, a sophisticated graphical user interface and a knowledge based system allow to access ODESSEI at three different levels: the decision maker, the technical, and the data base management, in order to match the requirements and the expertise of the different users.