Decision Support System for Demining Waterways

In the beginning of 2002, Croatian Waters, a state water management system, gave the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the University of Split a project with the main objective of determining the optimal strategy for demining waterways by using contemporary scientific methods and tools

Hierarchic Approach to Mine Action in Croatia

The Republic of Croatia is one of the 10 most mine-contaminated countries in the world. There are almost 750,000 mines on 1,630 sq km of mine-suspected areas. About 170 sq km are actual minefields, while the rest of the area is contaminated with individual explosive ordnance. Mine-affected areas that have not been used for years, pose a huge economic problem and obstruct infrastructure development, reconstruction, and return of displaced persons to their normal lives. They also pose a significant safety problem. In particular, any activities carried out in mine-contaminated areas significantly threaten human lives and material assets. It is estimated that removing all the mines in the Republic of Croatia would cost approximately $1.473 billion (U.S.) and would require 10 years of intensive work

Decision support system to urban infrastructure maintenance management

Life-cycle management of urban infrastructure projects is very complex process from both management and economic aspects. Focus of this research is on urban infrastructure maintenance phase of a life-cycle, especially on decision making in maintenance problems. Urban infrastructure maintenance management deals with complex decision making process. The reasons for a complexity are: lots of participants, multi-disciplinarity, huge quantity of information, limited budget, conflict goals and criteria. These facts indicate that decision making processes in urban infrastructure management undoubtedly belong to ill-defined problems. In order to cope with such complexity and to help project managers during decision making processes this research proposes an application of multicriteria methods. Multicriteria methodology proposed herein is applied on priority setting problem. It starts with goal analysis followed by definition of urban infrastructure elements and development of adequate criteria set. Evaluation of criteria importance (weights) is based on a set of experts’ opinions processed by AHP method. An assessment of maintenance conditions of urban infrastructure elements is provided trough monitoring process. The way of using proper forms and procedures for data collection is presented as well. All collected data are processed by PROMETHEE multicriteria methods. The main result of a multicriteria process is priority maintenance list for urban infrastructure elements. The methodology is tested on road infrastructure of town of Split

The ANDROID Case Study; Venice and its Territory: Identification of Hazards and Impact of Multi-hazard Scenarios☆

Abstract The objective of the paper is to review already published scientific papers and other relevant documents to identify hazards, their intensities and probability of occurrence in the Venice territory. In order to achieve the objective, the authors have selected relevant research papers and state of the art documents. Since the Venice and its territory are prone to various hazards, multi-hazard scenarios have been taken into consideration. Hazard impacts are the following: earthquake, tsunami and meteotsunami, flooding/"acqua alta", subsidence, coastal erosion, salt wedge intrusion, pollution. The paper classifies potential impacts and recognises possible combinations of hazards that may occur in case study territory. A multi-hazard scenarios analysis considers impacts which, either occurring at the same time or shortly following each other, are dependent from one another or because they are caused by the same triggering event or hazard, or merely threatening the same elements at risk (vulnerable or exposed elements) without chronological coincidence (EU, 2010). The research presented in the paper serves as a support for cross-border multi-hazard assessment in other North-Eastern Adriatic Sea areas

Flood Risk Modeling under Uncertainties: The Case Study of Croatia

This study presents an approach for assessing the flood risk using the fully probabilistic description of the annual damage using the derived higher-order statistical moments of the annual damage random variable. The annual damage distribution is used to analyze the impact on the macro-scale agglomeration described with the unified damage function in the case study of the river Kupa, Croatia. The agglomeration damage function is derived through the unit damage function and estimated distribution of building thresholds within the studied agglomeration. The unit damage is described with the shape function, which can easily accommodate different forms of damage assessment depending on the available information. The estimated distribution of annual maximum flood levels is propagated through the agglomeration damage function into the annual damage distribution derived using higher-order statistical moments and presented with the exceedance probability, indicating the likelihood that a certain annual maximum damage can be exceeded. Besides the aleatory uncertainty of annual maximum flood levels, we analyzed the impact of the uncertainty in estimating the unit damage function upon the annual damage distribution. This uncertainty shows a significant impact on the shape of the annual damage distribution, particularly in the region of extreme flood events. Analyzing the annual damage distribution range, resulting from the uncertainty in damage functions, provides more information to policymakers in assessing the potential consequences on the future spatial planning programs, particularly from the strategic environmental assessment point of view

INTEGRATION OF MULTICRITERIA ANALYSIS INTO DECISION SUPPORT CONCEPT FOR URBAN ROAD INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT

Urban road infrastructure management deals with complex decision making process. There are several reasons for a complexity such as: multi-disciplinarity, lots of participants, huge quantity of information, limited budget, conflict goals and criteria. These facts indicate that decision making processes in urban road infrastructure management belong to ill-defined problems. In order to cope with such complexity and to help managers during decision making processes this research proposes an application of multicriteria methods. Therefore, a generic concept of decision support for urban road infrastructure management based on multicriteria analysis is proposed. Three multicriteria methods: AHP, SAW and PROMETHHE, in a combination with 0-1 programming are used. The main advantage of an application of multicriteria analysis is that all stakeholders could be objectively included into decision process. Therefore, setting up of criteria weights involves opinions from all stakeholders’ groups (stakeholders are divided into three characteristic groups). Evaluation of criteria importance (weights) is based on three sets of opinions processed by Analytic Hierarchic Processing (AHP) method. Three sets of criteria are then processed by Simple Additive Weighting (SAW) method resulting in a final set of criteria weights. By using SAW method, relative importance of opinions of all three stakeholders’ groups is introduced. Collected data are then processed by PROMETHEE multicriteria methods. Proposed decision support concept is validated on the problem of improvement of one part of an urban road infrastructure system for a large urban area of town of Split. The concept is efficiently applied on several problems regarding parking garages: location selection, sub-project ranking, definition of an investment strategy