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The need for
monitoring
policy needs and impacts
The transport sector is becoming much more complex from a planning point of view. Transport actors and information sources tend to be more diversified and heterogeneous. On the other hand, transport decisions are involved in an increasingly difficult multiparty negotiation process since transport tend to follow a global "networked" logic and national and regional administrations are constrained by their own territorial boundaries.
ASSEMBLING proposes three basic hypothesis in the research of advanced support systems for European Decision-makers:
A bottom-up monitoring approach is indispensable to generate updated and concrete transport information and knowledge, as close as possible to real situations. There are large number of information collection efforts (for instance ex-ante analysis of infrastructure corridors) which, despite their quality and interest, have no continuity and remain non harmonised. This approach may provide for useful answers to "What's up" questions.
A top-down approach is needed to integrate decentralised information and modelling systems as a consistent and policy-relevant knowledge sources. At the end, all is about empowering experts and decision-makers with tools helping them to better understand the needs and impacts of existing and future policies ("What if this policy is applied?") in an increasingly complex environment.
Current innovation on digital information and communication technologies (e.g. Internet) largely removes traditional concerns related to the access of non computer specialists to advanced decision-making tools, if these tools comply with key user requirements such as interactivity and friendlyness.
| New approach: Policy satisfaction | Conventional approach: Policy optimisation | |
| Main activity | Monitoring | Predicting |
| Domain of reality | key aspects | the whole system |
| Tools | by indicators as simple as possible | by models as comprehensive as feasible |
| Data | based on ordinary statistica data, when feasible | based on specific surveys, requiring missing data |
| Operation | Many on-line impact analysis controlled by the decision-maker | Few batch-runs of models controlled by the expert |
Are Complex Systems governable?: The need for monitoring impacts
The Pilot Observatory Network to be created within ASSEMBLING research consist on five Monitoring Centres located as follows: East Mediterranean in Greece, Nordic Triangle in Finland, Rhine Gateway in Netherlands, Pyrenees in Catalonia, West Mediterranean. Each Observatory will have a particular technical orientation and will share a common core to facilitate consistency and harmonisation at European level. The network will be open in order to be extended over time.
A Transport Infrastructure Monitoring Centre is considered in ASSEMBLING in its two key components:
An specialised "Information System", requiring specific data collection, management and dissemination strategies.
A "Constituency", in terms of assuring the permanent institutional and legal arrangements needed to give continuity to the monitoring exercise.
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