The complexity of issues requiring rational decision making grows and
thus such decisions are becoming more and more difficult, despite
advances in methodology and tools for decision support and in other
areas of research. Globalization, interlinks between environmental,
industrial, social and political issues, and rapid speed of change all
contribute to the increase of this complexity. Specialized knowledge
about decision-making processes and their support is increasing, but a
large spectrum of approaches presented in the literature is typically
illustrated only by simple examples. Moreover, the integration of
model-based decision support methodologies and tools with specialized
model-based knowledge developed for handling real problems in
environmental, engineering, industrial, economical, social and political
activities is often not satisfactory.
Therefore, there is a need to present the state of art of methodology
and tools for development of model-based decision support systems, and
illustrate this state by applications to various complex real-world
decision problems.
The monograph reports many years of experience of many researchers, who
have not only contributed to the developments in operations research but
also succeeded to integrate knowledge and craft of various disciplines
into several modern decision support systems which have been applied to
actual complex decision-making processes in various fields of policy
making. The experience presented in this book will be of value to
researchers and practitioners in various fields. The issues discussed in
this book gain in importance with the development of the new era of the
information society, where information, knowledge, and ways of
processing them become a decisive part of human activities. The examples
presented in this book illustrate how how various methods and tools of
model-based decision support can actually be used for helping modern
decision makers that face complex problems.
Overview of the contents: The first part of this three-part book
presents the methodological background and characteristics of modern
decision-making environment, and the value of model-based decision
support thus addressing current challenges of decision support. It also
provides the methodology of building and analyzing mathematical models
that represent underlying physical and economic processes, and that are
useful for modern decision makers at various stages of decision making.
These methods support not only the analysis of Pareto-efficient
solutions that correspond best to decision maker preferences but also
allow the use of other modeling concepts like soft constraints, soft
simulation, or inverse simulation.
The second part describes various types of tools that are used for the
development of decision support systems. These include tools for
modeling, simulation, optimization, tools supporting choice and user
interfaces. The described tools are both standard, commercially
available, and nonstandard, public domain or shareware software, which
are robust enough to be used also for complex applications.
All four environmental applications (regional water quality management,
land use planning, cost-effective policies aimed at improving the
European air quality, energy planning with environmental implications)
presented in the third part of the book rely on many years of
cooperation between the authors of the book with several IIASA's
projects, and with many researcher
