Decision support in nuclear emergencies

In a nuclear emergency, protective actions such as evacuation, sheltering a nd food bans can be taken to mitigate the consequences of any release of ra dioactivity. Within the RODOS project, an evaluation framework has been dev eloped to support the assessment of the costs and benefits of potential act ions. In order to help the decision makers gain insight into the decision p roblem and clarify their preferences, guidance can be given in three stages . First, the search of feasible portfolios of protective actions is seen as a constraint satisfaction problem; only those portfolios that satisfy cons traints depending on factors such as feasibility are worth further evaluati on. Second, the portfolios are ranked based on their consequences and the p references of the decision makers using either a multi-attribute value or u tility function. Third, a natural language report explaining the ranking is produced to help the decision makers gain insight into the decision proble m and refine the decision parameters. An intelligent decision system has be en developed to demonstrate the feasibility of the framework. (C) 2000 Else vier Science B.V. All rights reserved.