Decision Support Systems in Water Resources Planning and Management: Stakeholder Participation and the Sustainable Path to Science-Based Decision Making - Efficient Decision Support Systems: Practice and Challenges from Current to Future - page 424

2. Background: Water resources and DSS
Traditionally, decision support systems in water resources management have been
characterized by limited decision-making scope. These decision support systems have
typically been based on black-box optimization models, understandable only by technical
people, and developed for very specific purposes (such as reservoir and infrastructure
operations, engineering designs, etc). In general, such DSSs drew from a broad set of tools
aimed at informing and supporting decision making, including a) GIS and other
visualization tools to better 'read' and understand data, b) tools to help understand costs
and effects of construction alternatives depending on design specifications, c) operating
tables or models indicating actions to perform given a set of different coexisting constraints,
and d) simulations to understand consequences of different operating policies or
management alternatives, among many others.
In the US, there has been a move to consider these aspects since the 19 th century, but the
focus has been mostly on economic impact. For example, the 1936 Flood Control Act
required only that the benefit-cost analysis be positive for a plan to be deemed feasible, and
subsequent documents consolidated the concept of “ contribution to national income ” as the
preeminent water resources planning objective (Loucks et al, 1981). Consequently, economic
objectives - measured through benefit-cost analysis - have dominated water resources
planning in the United States and worldwide, during much of the past century.
During the Harvard Water Program (1955-60), academicians and senior federal and state
agency employees worked together on research and training for water resource systems
design and planning. One of their principal goals was to “ improve the methodology of system
design in such a way that it will meet any reasonable economic objectives within reasonable
institutional constraints”. In other words, they developed tools and methods which, given a
planning objective, would determine what set of structural measures, operating procedures,
and water allocations (' level of development for different water uses ') would best achieve the
objective. They developed the use of multi-objective optimization methods, and proposed
objective functions for economic development that could also account for other important
aspects. The seminal topic that came out of this program (Maass et al, 1962) describes its
major accomplishments. Many of its methods remain in current use today for evaluating
and ranking design alternatives based on economic efficiency.
In an attempt to address some of the difficulties of assigning economic values to the broad
range of possible water resources planning objectives, the US federal government adopted
(in 1973) the Principles and Standards of the Water Resources Council (revised in 1979)
making environmental quality equally important to economic development as a planning
objective. Gradually, there was a transition in which benefit-cost analysis went from being
the primary objective to becoming a constraint required to ensure the economic soundness
of a plan, among and equal to other considerations (Loucks et al, 1981).
However, even when planners and decision-makers acknowledged the need to account for
other factors beyond benefit-cost and other quantitative analysis, the planning process was
almost always engineered through the lens of computer modeling, as evidenced in the
following citations: “ there are two basic approaches for solving planning models: simulation and
optimization ” (Loucks et al., 1981, p.21); and “ The principal way [...] to identify, predict and
evaluate the impacts of alternative plans or policies is through the development and use of
mathematical models ” (Loucks and da Costa, 1991, p.3).