This book constitutes the proceedings of the Joint INFORMS-GDN and EWG-DSS International Conference on Group Decision and Negotiation (GDN), held in Toulouse, France, during June 10–13, 2014. The GDN meetings aim to bring together researchers and practitioners from a wide spectrum of fields, including economics, management, computer science, engineering and decision science. The contributions report on research on individual and group decision support, negotiation and auction support and the design of systems and agents supporting such processes. From a total of 88 submissions, 31 papers were accepted for publication in this volume. The papers are organized into topical sections on collaborative decision making, auctions, knowledge decision support systems, multi-criteria decision making, multi-agent systems, negotiation analysis, preference analysis, data analysis, DSS / GDSS use, network analysis and semantic tools for group decision making.

Publication of the Handbook of Group Decision and Negotiation marks a milestone in the evolution of the group decision and negotiation (GDN) eld. On this occasion, editors Colin Eden and Marc Kilgour asked me to write a brief history of the eld to provide background and context for the volume. They said that I am in a good position to do so: Actively involved in creating the GDN Section and serving as its chair; founding and leading the GDN journal, Group Decision and Negotiation as editor-in-chief, and the book series, “Advances in Group Decision and Negotiation” as editor; and serving as general chair of the GDN annual meetings. I accepted their invitation to write a brief history. In 1989 what is now the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) established its Section on Group Decision and Negotiation. The journal Group Decision and Negotiation was founded in 1992, published by Springer in cooperation with INFORMS and the GDN Section. In 2003, as an ext- sion of the journal, the Springer book series, “Advances in Group Decision and Negotiation” was inaugurated.

Software is an essential enabler for science and the new economy, but current software methodologies, tools, and techniques are often still not sufficiently robust or reliable for the constantly changing and evolving market, and many promising approaches have proved to be no more than case-oriented methods that are not fully automated. This book presents the proceedings of SoMeT_23, the 22nd International Conference on New Trends in Intelligent Software Methodology, Tools, and Techniques, held from 20–22 September 2023 in Naples, Italy. The conference brings together researchers and practitioners to share original research and practical development experience in software science and related new technologies, and is an opportunity for the software-science community to take stock of where they are today and consider future directions. The 25 papers included here were carefully selected from the many high-quality submissions received after a rigorous review process, with each paper typically being reviewed by 3 or 4 reviewers. Topics covered range from research practices, techniques and methodologies to the solutions required by global business. SoMeT_23 focused in particular on intelligent software, the application of artificial intelligence techniques in software development, and tackling human interaction in the development process for better high-level interface, with an emphasis on human-centric software methodologies, end-user development techniques, and emotional reasoning for an optimum performance between design tool and user. Exploring trends, theories, and challenges in the integration of software and science for tomorrow’s global information society, the book captures a new state-of-the-art in software science and its supporting technology and will be of interest to all those working in the field.

This book recapitulates the major developments in Decision Support Systems (DSS) over the last 30 years in order to evaluate the research areas of decision making and in which direction the field should proceed. As it attempts to find a consensus about the next steps for the future of DSS research, the book also enforces the trends and new technologies currently in use. The book examines topics such as decision analysis for enterprise systems and non-hierarchical networks, integrated solutions for decision support and knowledge management in distributed environments, decision support system evaluation and analysis through social networks, and e-learning and its application to real environments. It clearly presents the evidence to support their cases and attempts to promote an extensive and objective discussion. In addition, the book also reflects on approaches to dead-end ideas and failures in DSS to better understand the lessons learned. The contributions for this book have been written by thought leaders and influential researchers from the EURO Working Group of Decision Support Systems (EWG-DSS).

This book is an attempt to establish in the readers the importance of creating interoperable data stores and writing rules for handling this data. It also covers extracts from a few project dissertations and a research funded project that the author had supervised.• Describes the power of ontologies for better data management• Provides an overview of knowledge engineering including ontology engineering, tools and techniques• Provides sample development procedures for creating two domain ontologies.• Depicts the utility of ontological representation in situation awareness• Demonstrates recommendation engine for unconventional emergencies using a hybrid reasoning approach.• The text explains how to make better utilization of resources when emergency strikesGraduates and undergraduates doing courses in artificial intelligence, semantic web and knowledge engineering will find this book beneficial.

This book presents real-world decision support systems, i.e., systems that have been running for some time and as such have been tested in real environments and complex situations; the cases are from various application domains and highlight the best practices in each stage of the system’s life cycle, from the initial requirements analysis and design phases to the final stages of the project. Each chapter provides decision-makers with recommendations and insights into lessons learned so that failures can be avoided and successes repeated. For this reason unsuccessful cases, which at some point of their life cycle were deemed as failures for one reason or another, are also included. All decision support systems are presented in a constructive, coherent and deductive manner to enhance the learning effect. It complements the many works that focus on theoretical aspects or individual module design and development by offering ‘good’ and ‘bad’ practices when developing and using decision support systems. Combining high-quality research with real-world implementations, it is of interest to researchers and professionals in industry alike.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing, ICSOC 2016, held in Banff, AB, Canada, in October 2016. The 30 full papers presented together with 18 short papers and 8 industrial papers in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 137 submissions. The selected papers covered important topics in the area of service-oriented computing, including foundational issues on service discovery and service-systems design, business process modelling and management, economics of service-systems engineering, as well as services on the cloud, social networks, the Internet of Things (IoT), and data analytics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Group Decision and Negotiation, GDN 2020, which was planned to be held in Toronto, ON, Canada, during June 7–11, 2020. The conference was cancelled due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Nevertheless, it was decided to publish the proceedings, because the review process had already been completed at the time the cancellation was decided. The field of Group Decision and Negotiation focuses on decision processes with at least two participants and a common goal but conflicting individual goals. Research areas of Group Decision and Negotiation include electronic negotiations, experiments, the role of emotions in group decision and negotiations, preference elicitation and decision support for group decisions and negotiations, and conflict resolution principles. The 14 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 75 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: Conflict Resolution, Preference Modeling for Group Decision and Negotiation, Intelligent Group Decision Making and Consensus Process, Collaborative Decision Making Processes.