Supporting actors involved in water resources management
TwoLe Planning Engine is GNU GPLv3-covered free software for supporting Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). It provides advanced optimization (stochastic dynamic programming) and simulation engines suitable to allow Decision Support Systems (DSS) to explore water management policies for multi-criteria water planning.
The provided optimization and simulation algorithms enable the design and evaluation of water management policies even for multipurpose reservoir networks under different scenarios and goals.
Such kind of mathematical support may be of great importance to allow the actors (stakeholders, decision makers, domain-experts) which are involved in the IWRM problem to move from the complexity of the IWRM modeling to the complexity of the decision problem, relying on automatic tools to explore different scenarios and goals while focusing on the effects of different water management policies.
On the other hand, publicly available software for supporting IWRM decision-making can be viewed as a transparency prerequisite to provide involved actors the ability to understand the implications of the technical apparatus on decision-making and to mitigate unwanted technology-driven biases.
The transparency requirements can be articulated in the very basic demand to be able to freely run the software and to study its complete and non-vague formulation (which needs the public availability of the source code) and in the possibility to correct and improve the software and release improvements to the public. Even if such possibility is usually exploitable only by competent researchers, its importance is vital to raise IWRM actors awareness about the intrinsic fallibility of technical apparatuses and to ensure them the maximum degree of dependability in relying on such software, which is achievable allowing and promoting the maximum degree of public verifiability. These requirements are satisfied only by free software, because the definition of free software is equivalent to them.
This is an excerpt of the TwoLe Planning Engine presentation you can find at http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/twole-plan Please refer to that URL to learn about other important aspects of TwoLe Planning Engine.
