Name	appeau
Title	SACADEAU-APPEAU: Decision-aid to improve streamwater quality
Responsable	Marie-Odile Cordier
Begin	2007
State	Ongoing
Description	The Sacadeau project (Système d'Acquisition de Connaissances pour l'Aide à la Décision pour la qualité de l'EAU - Knowledge Acquisition System for Decision-Aid to Improve Streamwater Quality) was funded by Inra (French institute for agronomy research) from October 2002 to October 2005. The main partners were from Inra (Sas from Rennes and Bia from Toulouse) and from Irisa. We have continued to develop the Sacadeau model with our partners until now and a PdD thesis has been funded by Inra. We are now involved in a new project, named Appeau and funded by anr/add, which started in February 2007. The Appeau project aims at studying which politics, for which agronomic systems, are best adapted to improve water management. It includes our previous partners as well as new ones, mainly from Inra. In this framework, our work aims at building a decision-aid tool to help specialists in charge of the catchment management to preserve the streamwater quality. The Sacadeau simulation model couples two qualitative models, a transfer model describing the pesticide transfer through the catchment and a management model describing the farmer decisions. The simulation results are analyzed, thanks to classification and symbolic learning techniques, in order to discover rules explaining the pesticide concentration in the stream by the climate, the farmer strategy, the catchment topology, etc. and, finally, in order to build recommendation actions for a given situation. In the Appeau context, the idea is to study how this kind of model can be used to simulate scenarios in a more generic way and to compare, and possibly unify, our work with what is done by our partners from Sas concerning nitrate transfer.