Frame work of decision supp ort system for water resources planning and management

Decision making for surface water resource planning and management is a daunting challenge, as it requires not only an in-depth understanding of physical flows, human activities, socio-economic conditions, societal, political and cultural contexts, but also of how they interrelate with each other. In India, as most river basins are quite large, the spatial heterogeneity of all these factors, as well as their scaling-up, are critical issues that need to be addressed. Water management is becoming increasingly complicated in relation to our society's requirements and needs. A decision support system is generally designed to allow the integration of various aspects of water resources analysis scenarios and development measures. A Decision Support System (DSS) provides the Water Management Authorities a well-structured, userfriendly, practical and complete water resources management information system. It may assist the decision makers in taking the right decisions on the basis of good comparison of different strategies under various scenarios, and combine the benefits of Geographic Information Systems, expert systems and simulation models. Moreover, modern visualisation techniques enable the managers to get a quick insight into the various options and trade-offs. In that respect a DSS can also be quite useful for priority ranking in master planning studies. In this paper a conceptual frame work of surface water planning and Management DSS initiated under National Hydrology Project with the consultancy support of DHI, India is presented. Paper also presents enhanced features of DSS(PM) in comparison to DSS(P) developed under HP-II.