Plataforma de Apoio à Decisão Multicritério na Gestão Patrimonial de Infraestruturas de Água

Provision of water supply and sanitation services in Portugal is a shared responsibility between the 308 municipalities and the national, public holding company Águas de Portugal (AdP) and its subsidiaries. Municipalities are responsible for providing water services, either directly or indirectly through concessions, the former being predominant. For a sustainable and efficient water services management a wide variety of types of information is required: billing and accounting information, engineering information and support for decision-making, among many others. Furthermore, the Decree-Law 194/2009 dictates that all water utilities should have information maintenance and data management practices. However, water utilities? information management efficiency often falls short of desired results. This happens particularly in municipalities where management is structured according to local government model conventions. Insufficient planning leads to a lack of integration that involves information fluxes and its uses. So, the aim of the proposed DECIdE project is the development of an IT platform that integrates data from different information systems (IS) and that includes tools to support decision-making. The project will have three main activities: A1 ? Characterization of IS; A2 ? Platform development; A3 ? Report elaboration. The first activity involves the characterization and survey of the existing IS of the water utilities project partners. The second activity consists of IT platform development, open-source, which will integrate data from the different IS identified in the first activity. In this activity, some assessment tools will be developed such as the calculation of water balance. Finally, the third activity consists of the preparation of reports such as user?s guide and best practices guidelines for efficient information management. These reports aim to support water utilities in planning, acquiring, organizing and maintaining long-term effective and efficient information. The water utilities partners of the project will follow up the three activities, since they will be the end-users of the platform.