Expert system for selecting and prioritizing projects for handling urban water supply crises

ABSTRACT

The water supply crisis (UWC) has affected various cities around the world. The variability of possible causes, the many viable alternatives to UWC management and methodologies for selecting these alternatives, as well as local government’s economic and technical constraints make the problem complex. The aim of this paper is to help select a set of alternative solutions suitable for the UWC problem. The proposed methodology comprised the following steps: (1) theoretical foundation, (2) planning the expert system (ES) to be built, (3) formal knowledge explicitation, (4) knowledge coding, (5) evaluation and adequacy of ES and (6) application of ES to real-life UWC cases. The main result was a computational decision support system, called UWC-ES. The conclusion was that UWC-ES behaved as a computational tool that reasonably reproduces knowledge from various human experts with acceptable applicability, and considering the possibility of using it in other cases.

KEYWORDS:

• Management strategies
• rule-based expert system
• water crisis

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their gratitude for the financial support from the Brazilian agencies CNPq (Project Nº 556084/2009-8) and CAPES. The authors would like to express their gratitude to the following institutions: Brazilian Federal District’s Regulatory Agency for Water, Energy and Sanitation (ADASA), Water National Agency of the Brazil (ANA), Brazilian Federal District’s Water Supplier and Sanitation Company (CAESB) and Brazilian Federal District’s Planning Company (CODEPLAN).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, CNPq [556084/2009-8].