A visualization enhanced fuzzy decision support tool for water resource management tasks

Water resource management evaluation and planning is an important issue in the context of natural resources management, as it impacts the society, environment, ecology and economy. In the context of the information society, the development of comprehensive decision support components, with the capability of displaying the results of data processing in a meaningful form for the user, becomes increasingly important. This paper proposes a decision support component for water resource management assessment tasks. As many current state of the art approaches, the proposed component employs fuzzy logic in the management evaluation part, using a hierarchical process analysis strategy with qualitative reasoning. Unlike previous existing works, we aim to enhance the presentation of the assessment results by displaying them not only in the form of linguistic qualifiers assigned to the management policy, but also in a graphical form consisting in a geotypical textured map of the region, where the natural texture changes according to the evaluation result for a specific category and according to the qualifier assigned to the management policy (varying from worst to very good). This allows the user to get multiple clues on the results of the water resource management evaluation, hopefully in a more meaningful way than from the numerical/linguistic assessment alone. The proposed component was implemented for the water resource management evaluation in the Somes river basin in Romania.