CADRe: A Negotiation Support System for Water Management
Will O Cain, SA Pierce, Michael Ciarleglio, JW Barnes, R. M. Jenevein, TS Lowry, JM Sharp, VC Tidwell · Proceedings of Water Down Under 2008 · 2008
Managing water resources is a difficult endeavour made even more complex when multiple stakeholders are involved. Model supported dialogue can aid a shared understanding of the complex aspects in water resource problems, but software applications for use in dynamic negotiation settings are not readily available. Attempts that integrate disparate software applications to aid real-time discussion do not adequately serve the users without additional customisation or programming, which is expensive and prone to error. A more general software approach may provide solutions for problems encountered in negotiation support, or decision support for multiple users. Elements of this software would include user data definition, model creation, frameworks for executing models and searches, results display, and comparison. However, to be reusable, a negotiation support system or toolset must also maintain flexibility in the areas of input data, models, projects, scenarios, output formats, search algorithms, and customisation. CADRe (which stands for Computer Assisted Dispute Resolution), a joint project of The University of Texas at Austin and Sandia National Laboratories, is an attempt to combine the requisite solutions and flexibility into a single software package that serves as a reusable negotiation support system. CADRe makes use of abstractions, or generalised object oriented implementations of the application toolsets, in the pursuit of this goal. The resulting system is independent of any particular research domain. CADRe has been utilized in two related, but different, research projects for interactive water resources modelling. The first application was a groundwater availability assessment case study in central Texas, USA, while the second involved a water marketing experiment in southwestern New Mexico. The applications have been synergistic with the development of the CADRe system, because both applications benefited from reusable system components, and the components themselves were strengthened by being exercised across different problem domains.