Research article
An Information System for Brownfield Regeneration: providing customised information according to stakeholders' characteristics and needs

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2018.03.059Get rights and content

Highlights

  • An Information System for Brownfield Regeneration has been developed for stakeholders.

  • The system relies on Artificial Neural Networks to answer to users' information needs.

  • The tool has been tailored according to stakeholders' inputs from different countries.

Abstract

In the EU brownfield presence is still considered a widespread problem. Even though, in the last decades, many research projects and initiatives developed a wealth of methods, guidelines, tools and technologies aimed at supporting brownfield regeneration. However, this variety of products had and still has a limited practical impact on brownfield revitalisation success, because they are not used in their entire potential due to their scarce visibility. Also, another problem that stakeholders face is finding customised information.

To overcome this non-visibility and not-sufficient customisation of information, the Information System for Brownfield Regeneration (ISBR) has been developed, based on Artificial Neural Networks, which allows understanding stakeholders' information needs by providing tailored information.

The ISBR has been tested by stakeholders from the EU project TIMBRE case studies, located in the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland and Romania. Data gained during tests allowed to understand stakeholders' information needs.

Overall, stakeholders showed to be concerned first on remediation aspects, then on benchmarking information, which are valuable to improve practices in the complex field of brownfield regeneration, and then on the relatively new issue of sustainability applied to brownfield regeneration and remediation.

Mature markets confirmed their interest for remediation-related aspects, highlighting the central role that risk assessment plays in the process. Emerging markets showed to seek information and tools for strategic and planning issues, like brownfield inventories and georeferenced data sets.

Results led to conclude that a new improved platform, combining the ISBR functionalities with geo-referenced ones, would be useful and could represent a further research application.

Introduction

The European Environmental Agency (EEA) has estimated that there are three million brownfields in the EU (EC, 2013), which require effective and sustainable redevelopment (Pizzol et al., 2016, Bartke et al., 2016). To report some examples of the magnitude of the problem for some EU countries, in Czech Republic in 2007 the National Strategy for Regeneration of Brownfields estimated that there were 10,300 ha (ha) of brownfield land. This information did neither consider sites of less than 1 ha nor mining sites, and not the region of Prague, which could be significant omissions in terms of surface affected by brownfields. In Germany, brownfield sites were estimated to cover approximately 128,000 ha (CLARINET, 2002). In Poland in 2002, the Ministry of Environment estimated 3230 potential brownfield sites (Oliver et al., 2005). However, in general, the regeneration process is still slow and often unsuccessful due to several problems, delays and failure factors. In the recent decades, many EU research projects and initiatives (CLARINET, 2002, CABERNET, 2006, RESCUE, 2005, REVIT, 2007a, REVIT, 2007b) developed a wealth of approaches, manuals, tools and technologies aimed at supporting brownfield regeneration, including stakeholders involvement approaches and methodologies to improve the sustainability of the selected regeneration alternatives (Harclerode et al., 2015, Alexandrescu et al., 2018, Alexandrescu et al., 2016, Alexandrescu et al., 2017), However, this variety of products has had and still has a limited practical impact on brownfield revitalisation success, because they are often not used to their full potential due to their scarce visibility (Bartke et al., 2013). Consequently, stakeholders responsible for brownfield regeneration are not always aware of the possibility to apply such useful and already available approaches and tools. Hence, the non-visibility of many of the developed approaches, methodologies and tools for brownfield regeneration hampers stakeholders in accessing useful information and is therefore recognised to be a problem (Rizzo et al., 2013).

Already in 2006, the CABERNET network recognised the importance of visibility and availability of information for successful brownfield regeneration because, in all the regeneration steps and activities, decisions need to be informed and based on up-to date and appropriate information (CABERNET, 2006, Cianflone and et Di Marco, 2007).

Beside the non-visibility of information, another problem is represented by the difficulties that stakeholders face when searching for customised information. Indeed, stakeholders' information needs can be influenced by specific legal frameworks, site-specific requirements, local administrative and funding structures as well as by stakeholders' roles (Rizzo et al., 2013). Consequently, the need to develop an information tool able to take into consideration stakeholder's characteristics has been recognised, including requirements to provide them with suitable information.

In order to respond to this need and to solve the problem of non-visibility of information and not-sufficient customisation, the Information System for Brownfield Regeneration (ISBR) has been developed. This tool has been designed to make available to stakeholders the information they need taking into consideration their characteristics, specific requirements and information needs, as well as information evaluations provided by previous users.

Accordingly, this paper aims to present the ISBR and its ranking methodology based on Artificial Neural Networks, which allows understanding stakeholders' information needs and to answer them providing customised information. Others specific objectives concern the identification of trends in stakeholders' information requirements as well as of different patterns of behaviours depending on the roles stakeholders play, the context where the information need to be applied, and the geographic context where stakeholders act. Finally, more technical object concerns to test the ability of ANN to deal with lack of information and the capacity to dynamically reflect changes in user's preferences.

Information systems are software and hardware systems that are very useful for data-intensive applications. According to Lucas (1990), information systems are computerised set of procedures that, when executed, provide information to support processes, decision-making and control in the organisation.

An example of information system for brownfield-related issues is the United Nations Environment Programme “Global Partnership on Waste Management” Information Platform, which supports exchange of on-line information for proper waste management. Moreover, in 1996, the US EPA launched the Contaminated Site Clean-Up Information (www.clu-in.org), which is a web site that provides information about innovative treatments and site characterization technologies to the remediation community.

At EU level, EUGRIS, the portal for soil and water management in Europe, makes available pre-eminent sources of technical, policy and research information on contaminated land and brownfields across Europe. The EUGRIS portal integrates a collection of information with a search engine and a dissemination tool. It offers links to sources of information and allows registered users to share their own information as well. EUGRIS allows open and user-friendly access to information according to specific users' needs. Most of the information collected in EUGRIS is meta-data (i.e. information about the information, rather than the information itself, which is stored on the source website) (Bardos et al., 2009). In 2011, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) developed the Superfund Site Information, which supports users in finding information on sites being assessed under the Superfund program.

Considering the information systems described above and the related purposes, the ISBR presented in this paper shares with them the aim of improving exchange of useful information on brownfield regeneration among users. Additionally, the ISBR supports understanding brownfield stakeholders' characteristics and information needs in order to provide them with the most customised information on brownfield management.

The main idea behind the ISBR is to tailor search results to the user who requests them. As, in general, there is no a priori knowledge about users, there is the need for a ranking methodology able to determine users' needs from the behaviour of similar previous users. To this end an artificial intelligence based methodology has been implemented which makes use of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in order to learn from users and improve ranking results with time. ANNs (Mehrotra et al., 1997) are mathematical nonlinear regression models, which, after a so-called “learning phase”, are able to infer the model underlying a set of given inputs and outputs, used as a “training set”.

The ISBR has been presented to stakeholders from the case studies of the European project TIMBRE, located in the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland and Romania, which have been involved to test and improve the tool, and to “feed” the ANN during the learning phase.

In the first part of Methods section, the structure of the tool, comprehending the ANN methodology, is elucidated. Following, case studies and stakeholder involving activities conducted to test and improve the ISBR are described. Next, in Section 3, an in-depth overview on the results and discussion is reported; finally, a closing section outlines the Conclusions.

Section snippets

Structure of the Information System for Brownfield Regeneration

The ISBR has been developed to characterise users (brownfield regeneration stakeholders) and their information needs and to provide them with customised information. In order to achieve these objectives and to be at the same a user-friendly tool, the ISBR has been structured in two main components, the web database and the ANN ranking methodology, which have been integrated by means of easy to use interfaces (Fig. 1).

Within the web database, web-links to information of interest on brownfield

Identification of stakeholders' information needs

Information needs can be influenced by the roles stakeholders have, which means by the categories they belong to and by the commitments they have to fulfil. According to Rizzo et al. (2015), stakeholders dealing with brownfield regeneration can belong to the following categories: site owners, site neighbours, local authorities, region and sub-regional government, regional and national regulators, local community groups, public interest groups, developer/investors, technology providers,

Conclusions

Effective availability and sharing of useful information among stakeholders dealing with brownfield regeneration has been recognised to be crucial for informed and successful decision-making processes (Rizzo et al., 2015). This requires proper information visibility and customisation according to stakeholders' characteristics and information needs. Accordingly, the developed ISBR proved to be designed to support improving information visibility and understanding characteristics and information

Acknowledgement

The authors gratefully acknowledge the receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme in the theme ENV.2010.3.1.5-2—Environmental technologies for brownfield regeneration (Grant agreement no. 265364) - project TIMBRE – www.timbre-project.eu.

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