Suite of software tools for urban water management
A good number of metropolitan areas throughout Europe depend on local groundwater resources for their supply of fresh drinking water. Protecting and managing these resources in a sustainable manner involves dealing with the varied interests of the local inhabitants, local business, local government, water utilities, etc. This can be quite an undertaking. In order to meet this challenge, a suite of software tools was developed during the AISUWRS project. FutureTec, a German firm with experience in applied informatics, developed the SEESAW (Socio Economic and Environmental Sustainability Assessment of Urban Water Systems) and Deliberator software. SEESAW contains multiple forms that helps its users design and administer questionnaires to the various stakeholders. Once information about preferences and priorities related to water management issues (e.g. quality, pricing) is aggregated, additional functionality enables the statistical analysis of this data. A complete assessment of the perception of urban water management can be made using the SEESAW output files. The role of Deliberator is to gauge the overall feasibility of various intervention measures, referred to as scenarios, based on stakeholder feedback. Decision support is assisted by three-dimensional matrices where the stakeholders, actions and decision criteria form the three axes. With respect to user-friendliness, SEESAW is based on a common platform (Microsoft Excel®). English and German language support is available for both tools and additional languages can easily be added in the future. FutureTec has copyrighted both software applications.
