ePolicy is aimed at supporting policy makers in their decision process across a multi-disciplinary effort aimed at engineering the policy making life-cycle. For the first time, global and individual perspectives on the decision process are merged and integrated. The project focuses on regional planning and promotes the assessment of economic, social and environmental impacts during the policy making process (at both the global and individual levels). For the individual aspects, ePOLICY aims at deriving social impacts through opinion mining on e-participation data extracted from the web. To aid policy makers, citizens and stakeholders, ePOLICY heavily relies on visualization tools providing an easy access to data, impacts and political choices.

The ePOLICY project provides a decision support system for aiding policy makers in their decision process across the engineering of a policy making life-cycle. The life-cycle integrates, in a unique way, global and individual perspectives on the decision process, bringing to the policy maker’s attention both global concerns (e.g., impacts, budget constraints and objectives), and individual concerns (i.e. opinions, reactions), giving guidance towards better policy implementation strategies. Global and individual perspectives relies on extensive use of optimization and decision support techniques and social simulation. An innovative game theoretical approach guides the interaction and conflict management between these two levels. In addition, the ePOLICY project proposes the evaluation of the economical, social and environmental impacts of policy at both the global and individual levels. Social impacts are derived from data retrieved by e-participation tools and social networks. Both policy maker and citizens are assisted in the decision-making and participation processes through advanced visualization tools. The proof of concept of ePOLICY will be an open source decision support system specifically designed for regional planning. In particular, the energy plan of the Emilia Romagna region of Italy will be modeled by taking into account strategic directions in the energy production from renewable energy sources. EU guidelines such as the 20 20 20 initiatives will be considered as well as social impacts and implementation costs.

The ePolicy project is supported by the European Commission's Framework Programme 7 from October 2011 to September 2014.