DECIDE Final Report (HE MSCA-PF Part A - Portal Summary Report)

This document comprises the Final Report Summary (Part A) of DECIDE (Decoding Cities for Informed Decision-Making), a research initiative supported by the Horizon Europe Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions Post Doctoral Fellowships (MSCA-PF) under the UKRI Horizon Guarantee Scheme - EU Grant no. 101107846. UKRI Grant no. 101107846-DECIDE/EP/Y028716/1. DECIDE addresses an important gap in urban planning, between the production of complex urban analytics and the communication of their outcomes. It does that by developping a novel Decision-Support Strategy (DSSt), and a Decision Support System (DSS) prototype based on the integration of Multi-Domain Models (MDMs), towards a "digital twin" approach for sustainable urban-regional planning. --- DECIDE considers the limitations of traditional Decision-Support Strategies: Data-Driven (DDS), Model-Driven (MDS) and Knowledge-Driven (KDS) when used within urban planning and urban governance contexts. As urban planning is inherently a design-oriented, interdisciplinary practice, those strategies that prioritise collecting massiva amounts of data and complex simulations (i.e. "digital twins", "smart cities"), or expert systems, focused on the technicians, often remain not translated into insights that decision-makers (usually non-experts, i.e. councillours, public officers or CEOs) can act upon. This is a technical disconnect in the language of communication communication which frequently ignores the human component of urban planning, leading to the misinterpretation of outcomes or outright neglection of vital analytics. To overcome this "technician's trap", it creates a novel theoretical framework: the Outcome-Driven Strategy (ODS). This human-centric approach prioritizes designing decision-support systems towards the accessible communication of complex urban analytics over raw data volume, ensuring information is actionable for diverse stakeholders regardless of their technical expertise. These principles were used to develop a Decision Support System (DSS) achieving a Technological Readiness Level (TRL) of 5-6, thus a full-scale, tested, prototype, --- The DSS prototype's full source code is released under a GNU General Public License (GPL) on GitHub, while all associated technical notes, sample datasets, research briefings and presentation materials are permanently archived across DECIDE's Zenodo repositories. --- Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only, and do not necessarily reflect those of the United Kingdom, European Union or their respective granting authorities. Neither the United Kingdom, the European Union nor the granting authorities can be he responsible for them.