IWR-PLAN Overview

The US Army Corps of Engineers Institute for Water Resources (IWR) has developed IWR-PLAN Decision Support Software to assist with the formulation and comparison of alternative plans. While IWR-PLAN was initially developed to assist with environmental restoration and watershed planning studies, the program can be useful in planning studies addressing a wide variety of problems. IWR-PLAN can assist with plan formulation by combining solutions to planning problems and calculating the additive effects of each combination, or "plan." IWR-PLAN can assist with plan comparison by conducting cost effectiveness and incremental cost analyses, identifying the plans which are the best financial investments and displaying the effects of each on a range of decision variables. The software is available via the IWR-PLAN Internet Download Site.

IWR-PLAN builds upon the basic plan formulation and comparison framework of the DOS program ECO-EASY: Cost Effectiveness and Incremental Cost Analyses for Environmental Planning, developed within the Corps Evaluation of Environmental Investments Research Program. The IWR-PLAN system transforms ECO-EASY to a Windows95 or Windows NT operating environment while adding new functions. Development of IWR-PLAN has been carried out within the Corps Decision Support Technologies Research Program, conducted at IWR. The Corps of Engineers and the Social Sciences Institute of the Natural Resources Conservation Service cosponsor IWR-PLAN development. To aid new users along the IWR-PLAN learning curve, a checklist of steps for applying the software is included under the section Getting Started.

IWR-PLAN takes user-defined solutions to planning problems and externally-generated estimates of each solution's effects and can formulate all possible combinations of those solutions, considering user-defined relationships between solutions. IWR-PLAN will then identify which combinations are the best financial investments through cost effectiveness and incremental cost analyses. Each combination of solutions is an alternative plan. If alternative plans have already been formulated outside IWR-PLAN, the user can bypass the routine for building combinations and still use IWR-PLAN to assist in identifying which plans are the best investments.

IWR-PLAN includes many new functions. An important one is that IWR-PLAN will keep track of the effects on up to ten user-defined variables. This makes IWR-PLAN a useful tool in watershed scale studies where there are likely to be a wide range of effects under consideration.

Other new functions include the ability to set constraints for all variables, to define derived variables (weighted combinations of other variables), to conduct sensitivity analysis, to examine different scenarios with different assumptions from one set of input data, to make comparisons across different scenarios, to track user defined "plans of interest", to export all IWR-PLAN data with direct links to other software, to view results through a variety of reporting and graphing options, and to access on-screen help.

IWR-PLAN's context-sensitive on-screen help system is available on each screen to define terms and explain how to use the screen's functions. This Online help, together with the Getting Started checklist and accompanying operating instructions, should provide enough information to operate IWR-PLAN successfully. Additional background information is provided by the procedures manual Cost Effectiveness and Incremental Cost Analyses published by IWR in 1995 (IWR Report 95-R-1). This manual is recommended reading - especially for new users without previous ECO-EASY experience. The manual is available by download from the section "Current Reports Online" on IWR's home page. Any comments on IWR-PLAN or on the IWR-PLAN home page are welcomed.