Prototyping an intelligent decision support system for improving urban infrastructures management

This paper describes an intelligent decision support system (IDSS) dedicated to coordinated management of urban infrastructures (SIGIU). This system identifies the data and related treatments common to several municipal activities and defines the requirements and functionalities of the computer tools developed to improve the delivery, performance and coordination of municipal services to the population. The resulting cooperative system called SIGIU is composed of a global planning and coordination system (SYGEC) and a set of integrated operating systems (SYDEX), each of them being associated with a specific urban system (sewerage, waterworks, etc.). In order to support the decision-making process, an IDSS was developed as a knowledge-based system provided with inference mechanisms that enables SYGEC and SYDEX to make strategic choices in terms of technical interventions on municipal infrastructures. The knowledge-based system stores experts' knowledge as well as solutions to past problems. Preliminary implementation results show that SIGIU effectively and efficiently supports the decision-making process related to managing urban infrastructures. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.