It is the outcome of the European project co-funded by the European Commission in the FP7 and coordinated by Michela Milano, professor at the University of Bologna.
The model has been already adopted with success by Emilia-Romagna and Piedmont regional governments. In particular, it has been successfully used by the Regional Agency for Environmental Protection in the Emilia-Romagna region (ARPA) for the energetic and environmental evaluation plan of Emilia-Romagna in 2011-2013. Furthermore, a partnership with the Scottish Government is being finalized to use the system in their administration.
The ePolicy project started in 2011 and involved nine partners of five European countries. It has been developed to create a tool to support political decisions through the creation of an integrated system of open source software able to assess the impacts of environmental, economic and social policies. In particular, the system takes care of the policies related to renewable energies (e.g. subsidies, de-taxations, green certifications), using the Energy Plan of the Region of Emilia-Romagna as a case study.
The key of success of the project is the perfect combination of global perspectives and individual opinions. The system, indeed, presents an advanced interface that can be easily used by both politicians and stakeholders. The tool is structured in three modules: the first is the planning module, used to generate alternative regional plans and to evaluate the economic and environmental impacts; the second is the design module, supporting the developing of incentives, subsidies and their simulation; the last one is the opinion mining module, able to evaluate the social impacts of the alternative plans.
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- E-Policy Project Published