Urban Watersheds Decision Support System Tools

Principal Investigator: David Stotts 
Funding Agency: MCNC 
Agency Number: 10129.003

Abstract
A multidisciplinary team consisting of experts in watershed management, environmental modeling, decision support systems, software engineering, and MIMS development is formed to design the next generation urban watershed modeling decision support system tools. Ongoing and planned research goals of this team includes: design of problem solving environments based on high-level notation and supporting tools for environmental modeling; development of software modules to automatically generate the scripts needed to interface model components; develop software architecture that would facilitate integration of existing urban watershed modeling systems with MIMS; and to develop a flexible watershed management decision support system that couples systems analytic methods with urban watershed models. Different combinations of the members of this research team have worked collaboratively in numerous environmental modeling and decision support system development research. In addition, several members are currently involved in the ongoing MIMS research effort, allowing the proposed development to grow and evolve with those activities. This unique combination of research members and the three institutions have the collective experience and background to accomplish the major goals of this proposed work. The PI (Stotts) will oversee the following component research efforts in the Computer Science Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.