Logic-Based Decision Support for Strategic Environmental Assessment
  Strategic Environmental Assessment is a procedure aimed at introducing
systematic assessment of the environmental effects of plans and programs. This
procedure is based on the so-called coaxial matrices that define dependencies
between plan activities (infrastructures, plants, resource extractions,
buildings, etc.) and positive and negative environmental impacts, and
dependencies between these impacts and environmental receptors. Up to now, this
procedure is manually implemented by environmental experts for checking the
environmental effects of a given plan or program, but it is never applied
during the plan/program construction. A decision support system, based on a
clear logic semantics, would be an invaluable tool not only in assessing a
single, already defined plan, but also during the planning process in order to
produce an optimized, environmentally assessed plan and to study possible
alternative scenarios. We propose two logic-based approaches to the problem,
one based on Constraint Logic Programming and one on Probabilistic Logic
Programming that could be, in the future, conveniently merged to exploit the
advantages of both. We test the proposed approaches on a real energy plan and
we discuss their limitations and advantages.
