Title: Web-based Decision Support in Water Resources Management

Authors: Jyri Mustajoki, Raimo P. Hämäläinen and Mika Marttunen

Status: Proceedings of the IASTED Conference on Environmentally Sound Technology in Water Resources Management, Gaborone, Botswana, September 11-13, 2006.

The proliferation of the World Wide Web has opened new opportunities to support participatory decision making. We now also have a number of tools to support participation and decision analytical methods. These opportunities are of special interest in environmental applications where we always have multiple objectives and multiple stakeholders who are often geographically in different locations. In this paper, we discuss the ways and requirements to apply decision analytical tools in Web-based public participation. We demonstrate a framework, which includes Web-based tools for decision analysis and participatory feedback. The applicability of the framework is discussed in terms of experiences obtained from three lake regulation applications carried out in Finland in the years 1995-2003. Our experiences strongly support the applicability of the proposed steering group approach with multicriteria decision analysis interviews.