A SYNTHESIS OF DECISION-MODELS FOR ANALYSIS, ASSESSMENT, AND CONTINGENCY PLANNING FOR OIL-SPILL INCIDENTS

Oil spill incidents can have a devastating effect on the natural envir onment. The evidence is clear that a lack of attention to an integrati ve approach in response strategies has resulted in the poor performanc e of clean-up activities in many oil spill incidents. This paper criti cally presents and evaluates decision models related to the modelling, analysis, assessment and contingency planning for oil spill incidents . The models are presented according to the hierarchy that characteriz es the decision-making process. We present an integrated conceptual fr amework that synthesizes all the above models and shows the interdepen dencies among the different echelons of the decision-making process. T he framework also identifies directions of modelling approaches for fu ture research.