A visual interactive optimisation tool for analysing alternate locations for petroleum distribution facilities: towards building an intelligent Decision‐Support System

This paper describes an intelligent Decision‐Support System developed to analyse alternate locations for petroleum distribution so that delivery, storage and dispatching costs can be considered jointly with potential environmental risks. It consists of a visual, modelling environment that allows decision‐makers to describe problems and a knowledge‐based component that interacts with users to generate and explore alternatives during decision‐making iterations. Given the run‐up in petroleum costs and the disruptive effect of environmental phenomena such as hurricanes, such assessments may be beneficial where tradeoffs between environmental risks and operating costs must be evaluated.