Decision Support System of integrated water management planning for the middle and lower Wupper catchment
For future water management measures, it will be necessary to identify all potentials for a catchment and to determine which action can serve as the "best solution." Both the variety of the technical, operational and orginasational measures and the physical location of the measures in the catchment are meant to be included in the potentials in this context.
Because many measures are bound with specific land uses, the opportunity to tap the full potential and find the optimal solution must be kept during the investigation of the entire catchment. This applies, for example, to the conception of an effective, implementable, but also financially and ecologically justifiable flood management concept, and to the improvement and protection of waterbody quality, where a survey and analyses must be carried out before the evaluation of the most suitable combination of measures can take place.
The goal of the project is to develop a sustainable treatment strategy for the Middle/Lower Wupper Catchment that is based on networked planning with measures from the fields of domestic water management, forestry and agriculture. Such a treatment strategy would amount to a management plan that contains the detail of a drainage master plan and furthermore adds a catchment-wide, regional conception involving agricultural land and regional transportation surfaces, which leads to economically and ecologically optimised water management solutions within a hydrologically interrelated area.
The project sequence is divided into the following:
- The underlying target factors of integrated planning (waterbody protection, drainage reliability, operational aspects, food protection, costs, eg.) Are developed together with the parties involved.
- An overview is given of measures aviable and models with theirnapplicability and constraints.
- Methodic and technical requirements for making investigations are established. This includes the formulationand simulation of conceivable scenarios and comparison under the use of multi-criteria evaluation processes. The necessary functionality for this is made aviable in a Decision Support System (DSS).
- The process of integrated water management planning is exemplarily documented in order to make it useful for other catchments.
