DESIMA: A Decision Support Tool for Integrated Coastal Zone Management

Abstract

Evaluating engineering solutions to coastal erosion and assessing the potential impacts of oil spills are some of the tasks that management authorities in Europe’s coastal regions are concerned with. The Inland and Marine Waters Unit of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre aims to support these authorities through the development of methods, tools and systems that integrate distributed coastal data and information. This chapter introduces a distributed information system, called DESIMA, that has been specifically created to support (European) integrated coastal zone management. The DESIMA-Demonstrator was designed to show the possibilities of such a distributed system. A key requirement for its design and implementation was that large data sets remain with data providers and that their data formats did not have to be changed. Furthermore, users had to have realtime access to data and models through a system architecture and user interface that allow interpretation of various formats on a single PC or workstation using a regular browser. To meet these requirements, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) was selected as a basis for the design of the DESIMA-Demonstrator, whereas Java was used for the user interface. Two applications, a coastal protection scenario and an oil spill scenario, demonstrate how a user can benefit from the DESIMA concept by using data and software that are implemented and maintained elsewhere. The coastal protection scenario enables the appraisal of three coastal management options in relation to flood risk for the town of West Bay (UK). The oil spill scenario simulates the evolution of an oil slick in the Gulf of Lion (France) and provides land cover data that allows the user to assess possible onshore impacts.