Nowadays, in modern highly developed societies, transport medium and long term decisions are made considering multi dimensional analysis: technical, economic, social, cultural and geographical characteristics. Transport is not only related to the movement of people, goods and merchandise, but also moves the culture of the society in all its richness and variety.
It is required during transport project evaluation process, the assessment and interpretation of the different factors and variables considering medium and long term scenarios. The more complex the model, the more complex the factors and variables involved.
The proposal is to build an intelligent system, supported by neural networks, with the capability to analyze and forecast social, economic and political variables, assisting future transport investment decision.
Hercules is a DSS (decisions support systems) which incorporates data and automatically generates a specific model according to expert knowledge to be applied to each specific problem. HERCULES database integrate information based on different sources:
Macroeconomic variables: selected from a set of rules from macroeconomic models.
Microeconomic variables: especially generated for the industrial sector under assessment.
Socio-regulatory variables: intended to reflect other the constraints which affect the model.
Based on HERCULES system analysis methodology, variables can be studied as a network of concepts linked to another network of interrelated concepts: building "generic concepts" which represent the set of environment elements which are probably related to other concepts with similar characteristics. The content is generated considering the historical background, its impact and current relevance, creating specific knowledge about the specific problem. Hercules objective is to advise the key decision makers with the appropriate information as part of a specific decision.