Keywords
decision support, regional planning, agenda 2, spreadsheet, nearest neighbor, air pollution
Start Date
1-7-2006 12:00 AM
Abstract
Public participation to environmental planning and management decisions, as suggested by localAgenda 21 processes, can be supported by software tools developed with a cyclic interaction with all thestakeholders and simple enough to be quickly operated by a large set of heterogeneous users. This also helpspreventing their rapid aging and their excessive dependence on changing technologies. We experimented thedevelopment of such software tools using an Office type environment to store data, analyse, andgeographically represent the effects of alternative decisions and html files to help utilizing the software anddistributing the information over the Internet. Two different applications are reported in the paper. The firstrefers to air pollution control in a region in Northern Italy and tries to evaluate the health impacts andexternal costs of PM10 traffic and domestic heating emissions. The second deals with energy planning atprovincial level and is specifically devoted to the exploration of renewable energies alternatives. Within bothsystems, some complex simulation/optimization model is needed to carry out a part of the analysis (e.g. tocompute the PM10 mean concentration produced by a given emission scenario). These models, which areextremely data and computer intensive, were simulated off-line for a number of different scenarios and thenembedded into the software tools with a nearest neighbour technique. While this approach certainly decreasethe precision of the overall results, it allows an instantaneous analysis of different proposals during the publicdebates and allows for a straight addition of further scenarios even produced by different off-line models
Supporting Environmental and Energy Decisions Through an Open Software Structure
Public participation to environmental planning and management decisions, as suggested by localAgenda 21 processes, can be supported by software tools developed with a cyclic interaction with all thestakeholders and simple enough to be quickly operated by a large set of heterogeneous users. This also helpspreventing their rapid aging and their excessive dependence on changing technologies. We experimented thedevelopment of such software tools using an Office type environment to store data, analyse, andgeographically represent the effects of alternative decisions and html files to help utilizing the software anddistributing the information over the Internet. Two different applications are reported in the paper. The firstrefers to air pollution control in a region in Northern Italy and tries to evaluate the health impacts andexternal costs of PM10 traffic and domestic heating emissions. The second deals with energy planning atprovincial level and is specifically devoted to the exploration of renewable energies alternatives. Within bothsystems, some complex simulation/optimization model is needed to carry out a part of the analysis (e.g. tocompute the PM10 mean concentration produced by a given emission scenario). These models, which areextremely data and computer intensive, were simulated off-line for a number of different scenarios and thenembedded into the software tools with a nearest neighbour technique. While this approach certainly decreasethe precision of the overall results, it allows an instantaneous analysis of different proposals during the publicdebates and allows for a straight addition of further scenarios even produced by different off-line models
