Handbook on Decision Making: Vol 1: Techniques and Applications (Intelligent Systems Reference Library)

Decision making arises when we wish to select the best possible course of action from a set of alternatives. With advancements of the digital technologies, it is easy, and almost instantaneous, to gather a large volume of information and/or data pertaining to a problem that we want to solve. For instance, the world-wi- web is perhaps the primary source of information and/or data that we often turn to when we face a decision making problem. However, the information and/or data that we obtain from the real world often are complex, and comprise various kinds of noise. Besides, real-world information and/or data often are incomplete and ambiguous, owing to uncertainties of the environments. All these make decision making a challenging task. To cope with the challenges of decision making, - searchers have designed and developed a variety of decision support systems to provide assistance in human decision making processes. The main aim of this book is to provide a small collection of techniques stemmed from artificial intelligence, as well as other complementary methodo- gies, that are useful for the design and development of intelligent decision support systems. Application examples of how these intelligent decision support systems can be utilized to help tackle a variety of real-world problems in different - mains, e. g. business, management, manufacturing, transportation and food ind- tries, and biomedicine, are also presented. A total of twenty chapters, which can be broadly divided into two parts, i. e.