Author(s)

Imen Hentati^1,2*, Mohamed Ali Fourati³, Nadia Trabelsi¹, Ibtissem Triki^1,2, Saïd Sassi⁴, Moncef Zairi¹

¹Laboratoire Eau, Energie, Environnement, Ecole Nationale d’Ingénieurs de Sfax, Sfax, Tunisia.
²Faculté des Sciences de Gafsa, Campus universitaire, Gafsa, Tunisia.
³Ecole Nationale d’Ingénieurs de Sfax, Sfax, Tunisia.
⁴STE ooDiRoo, Ejjwabeur Kerkenah, Sfax, Tunisia.

In Tunisia and particularly in Monastir region, groundwater constitutes the main source of water supply systems. A lot of problems are facing the water management authorities. In fact, the Moknine coastal aquifer highlights several qualitative and quantitative anomalies due to the irrigated perimeters extension (Teboulba, Bekalta), releases of harmful products from the textile industry (Ksar Hellal and Moknine), intense overexploitation and seawater intrusion. Thus, for groundwater resources management, a Decision Support System (DSS) is developed for the Monastir region. This Decision Support System (DSS) brings together, on a digital support, the data descriptive and graphical component for groundwater management. It is a hydrogeological relational database joined with a Hydrogeological Information System for the Monastir region (HISM) which enables fast and effective processing of large volumes of spatial data from multiple sources. The implementation of the Hydrogeological Information System is assured using Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). The “Unified Modeling Language” (UML) is an Object-Oriented Design (OOD) methodology which is choiced for data modeling. The application interfaces have been developed in Visual Basic (VB.net) within the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) from Microsoft Visual Studio. “DotSpatial” library integrated is used to manage the geographic information layers. The HISM contains thematic layers acquired through the vectorization of 22 topographic and geologic maps (1/50,000 and 1/25,000) and the input of descriptive data from water well and pollution sources from field and laboratory studies. The HISM has a great management capacity; it ensures the conversion from the geographic coordinates to the planimetric coordinates. It allows adding, modifying, deleting and editing data (Rainfall, piezometric and geochemical). It also ensures the storage and editing of the digitized and/or generated cartographic database. This DSS was applied to the superficial coastal aquifer system of Moknine to define a conceptual model of groundwater functioning and assessment vulnerability to seawater intrusion.

HISM, UML, DSS, DotSpatial, Vulnerability

Hentati, I. , Fourati, M. , Trabelsi, N. , Triki, I. , Sassi, S. and Zairi, M. (2019) Decision Support System Development to Groundwater Management and Aquifer Vulnerability Assessment: Hydrogeological Information System of Monastir (HISM). Journal of Geographic Information System, 11, 522-540. doi: 10.4236/jgis.2019.115032.