Decision support system for surface water planning in river basins

A decision support system (DSS) for the integration of hydrologic process m odeling and risk evaluation of the surface water management alternatives in a river basin is developed. The DSS, named CTIWM, is aimed at supporting t he testing and evaluation of water management policies and at facilitating integration of user-selected scenarios into planning strategies of the wate r resource system in the Chikugo River basin, a multipurpose multireservoir system. CTIWM uses a module library that contains compatible modules for s imulating a variety of hydrologic processes. Different numerical models are invoked through a user interface menu, which facilitates communications be tween users and models in a friendly way. The source code was developed by using object-oriented programming techniques. The result shows that the use of DSSs may effectively improve the speed and quality of water management and give users more flexibility in analyzing different scenarios.