About
Holiwast Decision Support Tool is a web-based tool that allows simultaneous comparisons of up to five stakeholder views or scenarios of municipal waste management policies. It is developed as part of an EU research project, see http://holiwast.brgm.fr/.
Purpose
The purpose of the decision support tool is to elucidate differences in understanding and opinions between the different stakeholders involved in municipal waste management decisions. For each scenario or stakeholder, it is possible to model different waste compositions, policy instruments, constraints and acceptable technologies. Results are presented in terms of differences between scenarios or stakeholders and in terms of environmental impacts and economic costs. The results are intended as a starting point for a dialogue between the stakeholders, to open up for an understanding of the differences in opinions, and eventually facilitate an agreement on the factual basis for decision making.
Best available technologies
Environmental results are calculated with data for "best available technologies" and are thus to be seen as a comparison of potential results for an optimised system. Results should thus not be taken to represent any specific existing system, and the tool cannot be used to compare existing systems with future planned systems. However, using the "Export to Excel" functions under "Feedback", the results of the simulations can be listed alongside similar data for the existing system, when these are available. Compared to technical tools, the decision support tool is not intended for comparing specific technologies, nor to model the impacts from specific combination of technologies. Rather, the decision support tool optimises the combination of pre-defined technologies, based on the user’s choice of optimisation criteria and policy instruments. To make the operation simple, the user cannot modify the technology data. Specific versions of the software, with other technology data, more representative of specific local situations, can be supplied on request.
Default data
The tool provides default data for all entries, in order to allow users to complete calculations, even when they have not complete knowledge of all details of the local situation. You can also start from a completely empty scenario. Finally, once you have created a new scenario, you can use this as a template for other scenarios. Especially when more stakeholders work together on a session, it may be practical to create a session scenario template with the local waste composition and other local data predefined, so that all stakeholders can use this as their starting point.
Start here
You begin by opening a session on the frontpage. After your session is created, you can create multiple scenarios and invite more people to participate in your session.
JavaScript and cookies
The Holiwast Descision Support System is designed to be used with JavaScript and cookies.
Browsers
This website is optimized for Firefox 2+ and IE6+. It has also been found to work in Mozilla, Safari, Camino and other standards compliant browsers. Please send us an email if you need support for a specific browser.