An intelligent decision support system for managing natural and man-made disasters

Climate change-induced disasters, in accordance with those related to human activities, are lately gaining in both severity and intensity.In view of their associated increased impacts on human assets and systems, public and private stakeholders have lately turned their attention to efficiently and effectively managing their effects, both prior to an event's occurrence, through better planning and protection, as well as during its temporal and spatial propagation at real-time through better operational adjustments and guidance to related authorities.In an effort to address this issue, the DECIDE project, funded by the IPA cross-border cooperation program, has developed, validated and tested under realistic conditions an intelligent Decision Support System (iDSS) for aiding public authorities in safe-proofing and protecting transport networks and operations in case of extreme weather events (EWE) and related natural hazards (NH).The iDSS is a webbased, GIS-enabled platform, able to suggest protection and management measures that optimally address occurring events, the affected modes of transport and transport networks and infrastructures.Optimal protection actions are derived from a database containing measures, strategies and policies that have been deployed at EU level in the last decades.In the framework of this paper, the iDSS architecture and main functional characteristics are presented, together with insights for its transferability to other locations.