Modelling impacts of cropping systems: Demands and solutions for DEX methodology

Decision modelling of diverse groups of problems makes different requirements to the modelling methodologies and software. We present an actual decision problem and the required characteristics of corresponding decision models. The problem is from agronomy and addresses the ecological and economic impacts of cropping systems, with the focus on the differences between cropping systems with conventional crops and the ones with genetically modified crops. We describe the extensions of an existing DEX qualitative multi-attribute modelling methodology, which were made to cope with the challenges of the problem. The extensions address general hierarchical structures, probabilistic utility functions and numerical values of basic attributes. A new, freely available software tool called proDEX was implemented to support the extended methodology. In this paper we describe the problem of cropping system assessment, propose methodological extensions to DEX, and present the implementation of proDEX. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.