Preface to the Special Issue on Decision Support Systems

The XVI CLAIO (Congresso Latino-Iberoamericano de Investigación Operativa) and the XLIV SBPO (Simpósio Brasileiro de Pesquisa Operacional) have been jointly organized and took place in Rio de Janeiro in September 2012. They are the two major events of Operational Research in Latin America and Brazil, respectively. Given the large number of papers dealing with Decision Support, thought began to be given to publish a special issue of the International Transactions in Operational Research devoted to Decision Support Systems (DSS), open to both attendees and non-attendees of the two above mentioned conferences. Although a strict definition of a DSS could limit the number of articles that would cover a “computer-based information system that supports business or organizational decision-making activities”, a more generic DSS definition could be adopted that would comprehend most subjects in decision support. The adopted definition, more comprehensive, is that “a DSS is any system that might support decision making”. Although computational systems are generally used, with this definition DSS no longer focus only on them and may even deal with purely theoretical themes. In fact, of the nine articles in this issue, three are essentially theoretical, one deals with a case study methodology, and the other five are case studies. The studied methodologies are as varied as the themes themselves. They include multicriteria analysis, multiobjective optimization, data envelopment analysis, financial analysis, data mining, and discrete event analysis. The first article of this issue deals with the theoretical properties of some compromise solutions reached by using a social choice function. The second introduces a new tool to assist on the study of pairwise judgments matrices, mainly in the revision of their consistency. The third article deals with the high number of criteria in a problem and how to reduce this number. The fourth article deals with the aggregation of soft systems methodology and discrete-event simulation applied to the study of a real production line. The next articles deal mostly with case studies. The fifth deals with a case study of verbal decision analysis. The sixth makes use of multiobjective programming, genetic algorithms, and geographic information systems to determine the location of clinics. The seventh uses data envelopment analysis (DEA) and fractional regression to estimate the more influential factors in farming efficiency in Brazil. The eighth paper in this issue studies investment planning in the Brazilian oil industry. The last paper makes use of data mining multivariate statistics to detect and rank procedure failures.