This book will prove a unique source of information and instruction for anyone seeking to make better human-oriented policy, whether urban planner, business strategist, or manager in the field of education, health or welfare, Ingeniously Wyatt has created two books in one: the main text covers the types of software package available: mainstream software, peripheral software, innovative software, frontier software; the lessons generated from the software are outlined in lesson boxes. Readers can use the text alone to familiarize themselves with the computer packages or read the boxes only, or they can do both.

Although much has been written on evidence-based policy making, this is the first volume to address the potential of GIS in this arena. GIS and Evidence-Based Policy Making covers the development of new methodological approaches, emphasizing the identification of spatial patterns in social phenomena. It examines organizational issues, including the

The essence of decision-aiding software is that it consists of various forms of microcomputer programming designed to enable users to process a set of (1) goals to be achieved, (2) alternatives available for achieving them, and (3) relations between goals and alternatives in order to choose the best alternative, combination, allocation, or predictive decision-rule. Benefits from using decision-aiding software include (1) being more explicit about goals to be achieved, alternatives available for achieving them, and relations between goals and alternatives; (2) being stimulated to think of more goals, alternatives, and relations than one would otherwise be likely to do; (3) being prepared to handle multiple goals, alternatives, and relations without getting confused and without feeling the need to resort to a single composite goal or a single go/no-go alternative; (4) being encouraged to experiment with changes in the inputs into one's thinking to see how one's conclusions are affected; and (5) being better able to achieve or exceed one's goals when choosing among alternatives or allocating scarce resources. There are five parts to the book covering: (1) a broad overview of decision-aiding packages, including criteria for evaluating them; (2) approaches that are based on management science and operations research, including linear programming and decision trees; (3) spreadsheet-based software, generally with goals on the columns, alternatives on the rows, relations in the cells, overall totals for each alternative at the far right, and a capability for indicating how the totals would be altered as a result of changes in the inputs; (4) expert systems software including rule-based and knowledge-based expert systems; and (5) general applications of decision-aiding software and a discussion of the increasing utilization of such software.

Vols. for 1963- include as pt. 2 of the Jan. issue: Medical subject headings.

The field of Information Systems has been shifting from an aeimmersion viewAE, which relies on the immersion of information technology (IT) as part of the business environment, to a aefusion viewAE in which IT is fused within the business environment, forming a unified fabric that integrates work and personal life, as well as personal and public information. In the context of this fusion view, decision support systems should achieve a total alignment with the context and the personal preferences of users. The advantage of such a view is an opportunity of seamless integration between enterprise environments and decision support system components. Thus, researchers and practitioners have to address the challenges of dealing with this shift in viewpoint and its consequences for decision making and decision support systems theories and applications. This book presents the latest innovations and advances in decision support systems with a special focus on the fusion view. These achievements will be of interest to all those involved and interested in decision making practice and research, as well as, more generally, in the fusion view of modern information systems.The book covers a wide range of topical themes including a fusion view of business intelligence and data warehousing, applications of multi-criteria decision analysis, intelligent models and technologies for decision making, knowledge management, decision support approaches and models for emergency management, and medical and other specific domains.

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.

28th European Symposium on Computer Aided Process Engineering, Volume 43 contains the papers presented at the 28th European Society of Computer-Aided Process Engineering (ESCAPE) event held in Graz, Austria June 10-13 , 2018. It is a valuable resource for chemical engineers, chemical process engineers, researchers in industry and academia, students, and consultants for chemical industries. Presents findings and discussions from the 28th European Society of Computer-Aided Process Engineering (ESCAPE) event

This book is the first to directly address the question of how to bridge what has been termed the "great divide" between the approaches of systems developers and those of social scientists to computer supported cooperative work--a question that has been vigorously debated in the systems development literature. Traditionally, developers have been trained in formal methods and oriented to engineering and formal theoretical problems; many social scientists in the CSCW field come from humanistic traditions in which results are reported in a narrative mode. In spite of their differences in style, the two groups have been cooperating more and more in the last decade, as the "people problems" associated with computing become increasingly evident to everyone. The authors have been encouraged to examine, rigorously and in depth, the theoretical basis of CSCW. With contributions from field leaders in the United Kingdom, France, Scandinavia, Mexico, and the United States, this volume offers an exciting overview of the cutting edge of research and theory. It constitutes a solid foundation for the rapidly coalescing field of social informatics. Divided into three parts, this volume covers social theory, design theory, and the sociotechnical system with respect to CSCW. The first set of chapters looks at ways of rethinking basic social categories with the development of distributed collaborative computing technology--concepts of the group, technology, information, user, and text. The next section concentrates more on the lessons that can be learned at the design stage given that one wants to build a CSCW system incorporating these insights--what kind of work does one need to do and how is understanding of design affected? The final part looks at the integration of social and technical in the operation of working sociotechnical systems. Collectively the contributors make the argument that the social and technical are irremediably linked in practice and so the "great divide" not only should be a thing of the past, it should never have existed in the first place.