Collective Decisions Theory Algorithms And Decision Support Systems

This book is a token of appreciation for Professor Gregory E. Kersten (1949–2020), one of the most prominent and active researchers and scholars in the broadly perceived field of collective decisions, notably negotiations, the author of numerous influential papers, books, and edited volumes, a great scientist, mentor, and a loyal friend and colleague. This book contains some papers in the fields of group and collective decisions, voting, social choice, negotiations, and related topics, with examples of real applications. The authors are top researchers and scholars from all over the world whose life and academic career has been inspired and influenced by Professor Kersten.

This open access textbook introduces and defines digital humanism from a diverse range of disciplines. Following the 2019 Vienna Manifesto, the book calls for a digital humanism that describes, analyzes, and, most importantly, influences the complex interplay of technology and humankind, for a better society and life, fully respecting universal human rights. The book is organized in three parts: Part I “Background” provides the multidisciplinary background needed to understand digital humanism in its philosophical, cultural, technological, historical, social, and economic dimensions. The goal is to present the necessary knowledge upon which an effective interdisciplinary discourse on digital humanism can be founded. Part II “Digital Humanism – a System’s View” focuses on an in-depth presentation and discussion of the main digital humanism concerns arising in current digital systems. The goal of this part is to make readers aware and sensitive to these issues, including e.g. the control and autonomy of AI systems, privacy and security, and the role of governance. Part III “Critical and Societal Issues of Digital Systems” delves into critical societal issues raised by advances of digital technologies. While the public debate in the past has often focused on them separately, especially when they became visible through sensational events the aim here is to shed light on the entire landscape and show their interconnected relationships. This includes issues such as AI and ethics, fairness and bias, privacy and surveillance, platform power and democracy. This textbook is intended for students, teachers, and policy makers interested in digital humanism. It is designed for stand-alone and for complementary courses in computer science, or curricula in science, engineering, humanities and social sciences. Each chapter includes questions for students and an annotated reading list to dive deeper into the associated chapter material. The book aims to provide readers with as wide an exposure as possible to digital advances and their consequences for humanity. It includes constructive ideas and approaches that seek to ensure that our collective digital future is determined through human agency.

A broad introduction to algorithms for decision making under uncertainty, introducing the underlying mathematical problem formulations and the algorithms for solving them. Automated decision-making systems or decision-support systems—used in applications that range from aircraft collision avoidance to breast cancer screening—must be designed to account for various sources of uncertainty while carefully balancing multiple objectives. This textbook provides a broad introduction to algorithms for decision making under uncertainty, covering the underlying mathematical problem formulations and the algorithms for solving them. The book first addresses the problem of reasoning about uncertainty and objectives in simple decisions at a single point in time, and then turns to sequential decision problems in stochastic environments where the outcomes of our actions are uncertain. It goes on to address model uncertainty, when we do not start with a known model and must learn how to act through interaction with the environment; state uncertainty, in which we do not know the current state of the environment due to imperfect perceptual information; and decision contexts involving multiple agents. The book focuses primarily on planning and reinforcement learning, although some of the techniques presented draw on elements of supervised learning and optimization. Algorithms are implemented in the Julia programming language. Figures, examples, and exercises convey the intuition behind the various approaches presented.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Rough Sets, IJCRS 2023, held in Krakow, Poland, during October 5–8, 2023. The 43 full papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 83 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Rough Set Models, Foundations, Three-way Decisions, Granular Models, Distances and Similarities, Hybrid Approaches, Applications, Cybersecurity and IoT.

Presents recent advances in both models and systems for intelligent decision making. Organisations often face complex decisions requiring the assessment of large amounts of data. In recent years Multicriteria Decision Aid (MCDA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have been applied with considerable success to support decision making in a wide range of complex real-world problems. The integration of MCDA and AI provides new capabilities relating to the structuring of complex decision problems in static and distributed environments. These include the handling of massive data sets, the modelling of ill-structured information, the construction of advanced decision models, and the development of efficient computational optimization algorithms for problem solving. This book covers a rich set of topics, including intelligent decision support technologies, data mining models for decision making, evidential reasoning, evolutionary multiobjective optimization, fuzzy modelling, as well as applications in management and engineering. Multicriteria Decision Aid and Artificial Intelligence: Covers all of the recent advances in intelligent decision making. Includes a presentation of hybrid models and algorithms for preference modelling and optimisation problems. Provides illustrations of new intelligent technologies and architectures for decision making in static and distributed environments. Explores the general topics on preference modelling and learning, along with the coverage of the main techniques and methodologies and applications. Is written by experts in the field. This book provides an excellent reference tool for the increasing number of researchers and practitioners interested in the integration of MCDA and AI for the development of effective hybrid decision support methodologies and systems. Academics and post-graduate students in the fields of operational research, artificial intelligence and management science or decision analysis will also find this book beneficial.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Decision Support Systems Technologies, ICDSST 2020, organised in Zaragoza, Spain, in May 2020. The conference was held online only due to the Corona pandemic. The EWG-DSS series of International Conference on Decision Support System Technology (ICDSST) is planned to consolidate the tradition of annual events organized by the EWG-DSS in offering a platform for European and international DSS communities, comprising the academic and industrial sectors, to present state-of-the-art DSS research and developments, to discuss current challenges that surround decision-making processes, to exchange ideas about realistic and innovative solutions, and to co-develop potential business opportunities. The main topic of this year’s conference was “Cognitive Decision Support Systems and Technologies”. The 13 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 51 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: methodological contributions; case studies and applications; and overview (on the current state and future trends of DSS, BI, and data analytics research).

This book proposes an approach to analyzing, designing and implementing Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS). The experience gained in developing a concrete system, Co-oP, suggests that GDSS should be distributed, loosely-coupled and process-driven. A distributed and loosely-coupled GDSS architecture provides autonomy and flexibility for individual decision-making, and homogeneity and simplicity for group problem solving. Also, process-driven GDSS are able to deal with the unpredictable nature of group problems since collective decision processes have been shown to be the only elements in a GDSS that are (i) stable enough to fit into most collective problems, (ii) reasonably structurable to be implementable, and (iii) sufficiently controllable to guarantee appropriate use. From a Multiple Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) viewpoint, this book supports the integrated use of various MCDM methods to help a GDSS (i) support a wide range of decision situations, (ii) attenuate the difficulty of information search, (iii) allow division of decision-making tasks, and (iv) permit consensus seeking analysis. Co-oP runs on a network of individual workstations. It contains a set of MCDM methods, techniques of aggregation of preferences, and a consensus seeking algorithm to support negotiation. Electronic communication among group members is monitored by a group norm filter which is adaptable to a large number of collective decision situations. This book also reports some empirical evaluations of Co-oP and expands the proposed approach to non-cooperation and organizational decision-making.

This monograph presents new developments in multi-level decision-making theory, technique and method in both modeling and solution issues. It especially presents how a decision support system can support managers in reaching a solution to a multi-level decision problem in practice. This monograph combines decision theories, methods, algorithms and applications effectively. It discusses in detail the models and solution algorithms of each issue of bi-level and tri-level decision-making, such as multi-leaders, multi-followers, multi-objectives, rule-set-based, and fuzzy parameters. Potential readers include organizational managers and practicing professionals, who can use the methods and software provided to solve their real decision problems; PhD students and researchers in the areas of bi-level and multi-level decision-making and decision support systems; students at an advanced undergraduate, master’s level in information systems, business administration, or the application of computer science.