Towards a Framework for the Development of Intelligent Environmental Decision Support Systems

Intelligent Environmental Decision Support Systems (IEDSS) are present in the environmental management process at different levels such as hazard identification, risk assessment, risk evaluation and intervention decision-making, but there is neither a well defined methodology nor a framework for the development of IEDSSs. The purpose of this paper is to provide a study on several approaches found in the literature to set-up a methodology and a plausible architecture for the development of IEDSSs. Also a general outlook into the classical decision making theories is done to provide a general and well based architecture. Taking into account the review of proposals, and some previous general architectures proposed by the authors, a new comprehensive architecture and associated methodology to develop an IEDSS for whatever domain is proposed. The methodology proposed and the architecture joins the main three cognitive tasks involved in a decision making process: analysis tasks, synthesis tasks, and prognosis tasks.