Objectives: The goal of this project is to develop a model of sustainable infrastructure that integrates ecological, human/political and engineering, concerns and to develop a decision support system for it. Examining, a working, system - the City of Houston, Texas - will facilitate development of a realistic model. City officials will both participate in the development and testing of decision support methods, and benefit from the findings. The project is directed to the following research coals: 1) Development of a conceptual model for integrated sustainable development in the natural, human, and built domains, 2) A prototype of a sustainable decision support system, 3) Identification of key theoretical and practical issues involved in integrating the Three domains, and 4) Development of theory relating decision-making, in the three domains.
Methods: For each of the three domains - built, human, and natural - a different approach will be used to define criteria for sustainability and the data required for modeling, that domain. These approaches will be integrated by modillion- the intersection of the areas in the decision processes sin- a modified form of enterprise modillion- commonly used in businesses. From the data, the research team will develop an information-technology -based community model that incorporates information from key stakeholders, key decision premises, and key values from each domain. Three of the five architectures needed in the decision support system will be developed in this project: 1) enterprise, 2) process, and 3) data architectures.
Potential Impact: The model and information support systems that are developed will have impacts in three areas. The clarification of the data necessary to make effective and sustainable infrastructure decisions will simplify and improve data collection. The information systems that are the result of this research will identify key performance metrics and simplify data preparation. Finally, improvements the metrics and the data will be combined with an organizational analysis to generate improved decision-making- tools that can be generalized to other urban systems.
