Chapter Seven Integrated Modelling Frameworks for Environmental Assessment and Decision Support

In this chapter we investigate the motivation behind the development of modelling frameworks that explicitly target the environmental domain. Despite many commercial and industrial-strength frameworks being available, we claim that there is a definite niche for environmental-specific frameworks. We first introduce a general definition of what is an environmental integrated modelling framework, leading to an outline of the requirements for a generic software architecture for such frameworks. This identifies the need for a knowledge layer to support the modelling layer and an experimentation layer to support the execution of models. The chapter then focuses on the themes of knowledge representation, model management and model execution. [...]