Appropriate modelling in DSSs for river basin management

There is increasing interest in the development of decision support systems (DSSs) for river basin management. Moreover, new ideas and techniques such as sustainability, adaptive management, Geographic Information System, Remote Sensing and participations of new stakeholders have stimulated their development. A DSS often encompasses a number of sub-models, such as models for flood risk, ecology, tourism, recreation and navigation. These models are fundamental in supporting the whole decision-making process. However, often complicated and sophisticated models are used which are difficult to understand and operate for decision-makers. Moreover, these models may be not necessary for some specific-purpose DSSs, such as those for preliminary planning purposes. The aim of this paper is therefore to find appropriate models by applying a proposed appropriateness framework. An appropriate system is defined as ‘a system which can produce outputs enabling decision makers to distinguish different river management actions under uncertainty according to the current problem’. The proposed framework is applied to a sub-model of a DSS — a flood risk model to illustrate the idea of appropriateness. The results show that the framework proposed is applicable. It helps distinguish the management actions and find the appropriate models for the DSSs