Appropriate Models In Decision Support Systems For River Basin Management

In recent years, new ideas and techniques appear very quickly, like sustainability, adaptive management, Geographic Information System, Remote Sensing and participations of new stakeholders, which contribute a lot to the development of decision support systems in river basin management. However, the role of models still needs to be emphasized, especially for model-based decision support systems. This paper aims to find appropriate models for decision support systems. An appropriate system is defined as ‘the system can produce final outputs which enable the decision makers to distinguish different river engineering measures according to the current problem’. An appropriateness framework is proposed mainly based on uncertainty and sensitivity analysis. A flood risk model is used, as a part of the Dutch River Meuse DSS to investigate whether the appropriate framework works. The results showed that the proposed approach is applicable and helpful to find appropriate models.