Software Agents for Assessing Environmental Quality: Advantages and Limitations.
Ioannis N. Athanasiadis, Pericles A. Mitkas · 2004
The last decades, there has been a remarkable change in modern societies. Environ-mental values are appreciated to a greater extent, as it has become evident that they are highly correlated with our quality of life. The aftermath of the growing societal interest in the environment and sustainable development was the emerging need for providing environmental information to the public. The challenge for Environmental Management and Assessment Information Systems is to provide efficient, accurate and timely electronic services to the public. In this work, we examine the applicability of software agent technology for automating the environmental quality assessment process. Software agents are best suited in systems that are modular, decentralized, changeable, ill-structured and complex, according to Van Dyke Parunak (1999). Environmental management and assessment systems are of this kind, and employing software agents to realize them makes possible the provision of advanced features. However, certain limitations may arise. Both advantages and limitations of agent-based applications for environmental monitoring and assessment systems are connected with real-world functionality. Environmental Management and Assessment Information Systems is a generic term that covers software systems responsible for 1. gathering environmental information from dissimilar data sources, 2. managing environmental data for supporting the decision making process in-volved in environmental assessment, and 3. post-processing data and facts for supplying citizens, industry, public institutions and government with information services related to the natural environment. Developing such systems is a demanding task, which requires interdisciplinary ef-forts originated from natural and environmental sciences, social and economic sci-ences, and informatics and computer science. In a schematic representation, we con-