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OIL SPILL MANAGEMENT SUPPORTING SYSTEM IN MALAYSIAN MARINE 
ENVIRONMENTS 
Seyedeh Zahra Pourvakhshouri'®, Shattri Mansor, Zelina Ibrahim®, Mohd Ibrahim Mohamad®. Mohammad Daud® 
"Institute of Advanced Technology (Zp@itmail.upm.edu.my, shattri@eng.upm.edu.my ) 
Faculty of Science and Environmental Studies (zelina, mibrahim)@fsas.upm.edu.my 
“Faculty of Engineering (mdaud@eng.upm.edu.my ) 
(Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400, Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia) 
Commission II, WG II/5 
KEYWORDS: Spatial Information Science, Decision Support, Knowledge base, Marine, Coast, Environment, Pollution, Management. 
ABSTRACT 
Oil pollution is one of the main problems affecting the marine coastal environments in Malaysia. This paper describes the development of 
a decision support system for oil spill management for the Straits of Malacca, Malaysia. Experts in different domains, including marinc 
and coastal environment, marine pollution as well as emergency and contingency responders were interviewed both in governmental and 
private sectors, to provide all required knowledge for preparing knowledge based system. The system will be able to advise the user for 
choosing the most reasonable method for prevention, control, and/or clean up against the oil pollution. The system will be able to 
determine priorities in emergency response conditions, according to the coastal sensitive areas. 
1. BACKGROUND 
1.1. Introduction 
Oil spills are serious environmental disasters, often leading to 
significant. long-term impacts on the environment, ecology and 
socio-economic activities of area. World-wide from 1978 to 
(995, there were more than 4100 major oil spills of 10,000 
gallons or more (Etkin & Welch, 1997). Several serious oil spill 
incidents also have taken place since 1995, notably examples 
like Sea Empress in which approximately 5000 tons of oil 
reached the UK coastline (Li, et. al. 2000). Oil spills also have 
many inland examples in industrialised cities. For example a 
city like Toronto, has an average 300- 500 oil spills per year 
with an average total volume of about 160,000 L/year (Li, 
2001). 
Different contaminated sites have different characteristics 
depending on pollutants’ properties, hydrological conditions, 
and a variety of physical, chemical, and biological processes. 
Thus, the methods selected for different sites vary significantly. 
The decision for a suitable method at a given site often requires 
expertise on both remediation technologies and site conditions 
(Geng, et al., 2001). Management of emergencies, resulting 
from natural or man-made disasters, requires enough 
information as well as experienced responders both in technical 
and co-ordination matters. In this way, a great amount of 
information should be used to improve the management of the 
emergency, which generally means making the best decision at 
the right moment (Hernandez & Serrano, 2001). 
Including more than 4670 km coastal borders with valuable 
mangrove swamps, shrimp prawns, birds’ breed and nesting 
areas, turtles egg laying as well as recreation and tourist resorts. 
has formed Malaysia as a big and important of coastal natural 
resources. Malaysia's coastal waters also experience oil 
pollution from bilge pumping, as well as from tank cleaning, 
which leads to dumping of oil and sludge by ocean going 
vessels. Collisions and groundings of ocean-going tankers also 
cause oil pollution. All these encouraged the researchers to 
create an intelligent system for assisting the managers in 
process of decision making in the case of oil spill happening. 
Making a multi-criteria decision support system, briefly, is the 
main aim of this project to advise the user for choosing the 
most reasonable method for prevention, control, and/ or 
cleanup way against the oil spills pollution. It will be an 
advisory service to determine the priorities in emergency 
response conditions that was planned according to the coastal 
sensitive areas in the Malaysian coastlines. 
1.2. Oil spill and decision making 
Decision-making is a complex process, influenced by many 
factors, both human and non-human. Academic research in the 
Decision Support System (DSS) field dates from the work of 
Gorry and Scott-Morton in 1971 (Keenan, 1997). A DSS may 
be defined as an integrated, interactive and flexible computer 
system that supports, not replace. all phases of decision-making 
with a user-friendly interface, data and expert knowledge 
(Fabbri, 1998). 
Some, but by no means all, recent DSS textbooks are including 
GIS as a component of management support systems (Fabbri, 
1998). GIS software provides a link between the interface and 
database to allow the user to easily query spatial data. Or even 
it can be used as a Decision Support System (DSS) generator to 
create Spatial Decision Support Systems (Keenan, 1997).