As the first decade of the 21st century draws to a close, Lisbon was selected to host the 15th IFIP Working Group 8.3 International Conference, DSS 2010. For this event, an inspiring and current theme was chosen: “Bridging the socio-technical gap in DSS – Challenges for the next decade”. The symbol of the conference was the statue of Prince Henry “the Navigator” (Infante D. Henrique), who was responsible for initiating the European worldwide explorations and discoveries at the early days of the Portuguese Empire (fifteenth century), and a patron of University of Lisbon, the institution hosting the DSS 2010 event. The reason for this choice of symbol is of course that innovation and entrepreneurship are also important characteristics of the IFIP Working Group 8.3.

Since 1982, the IFIP Working Group 8.3 conferences have aimed at presenting and discussing the latest innovations and achievements in the area of Decision Support Systems (DSS) and Decision Making (DM). These advances include theories, systems, methodologies, algorithms, techniques, applications and technologies supporting decision making. Each IFIP WG 8.3 conference has promoted a new research theme encouraging researchers to widen the boundaries for DSS research and practice in new directions.

At the 2002 conference, held in Cork (Ireland), participants were asked to evaluate the impact of the internet and to envisage its future potential. In Prato (Italy) in 2004, the “spirit of the humanist scholars of the Renaissance” was proposed as a source of inspiration to guide a reflection on the relevance of decision support in an uncertain and complex world. Creativity and innovation in decision making and support was the theme for the London (UK) conference, in 2006. Two years later, in Toulouse (France), participants were asked to reflect on collaborative decision making, presenting latest advances and discussing the multiple facets and challenges of collaborative decision support.

Bridging the socio-technical gap has been a challenge in many areas of research. The socio-technical gap is the great divide between the social activities which researchers and practitioners aim to support and those that are actually supported. Empirical evidence shows that this gap is due in part to technical limitations and in part to the complexity of the contexts where decision support must be provided. In DSS and DM, the challenges set by the socio-technical gap have raised several important questions concerned with the encapsulation of complex social aspects of managerial decision making, as well as with the representation of key human cognitive mechanisms, such as intuition and insight, within computational systems.

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of many exciting technological innovations and developments. Furthermore, these new technologies have become available to a wide population of users on a global scale at an unprecedented speed. Hence, the common user of information technologies has become more skillful and more demanding. Moreover, the progress in Human Computer Interaction has opened new directions for DSS design and development. DSSs can now be enriched by mobile features/tools allowing for ubiquitous data access and computing. Finally, the advent of Web 2.0 conveyed new forms of interaction and easy access to huge quantities of personalized information. The massive use of virtual network communities and other social software promoted the emergence of new types of social interaction and organization. All in all, context-aware computing is emerging as a key factor to enhance competitive advantage. All these innovations open new challenging directions for DSS and DM researchers.

Papers covering a wide variety of topics were proposed as contributions to the conference, including: Affect and emotion in Decision Support Systems, Decision Models in the real-world, Executive Information Systems, Negotiation Support Systems, Knowledge Management, Knowledge and Resource Discovery, Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing, Group Support Systems, Collaborative Decision Making, Socio-technical aspects for DM in Geographic Information Systems, Rich language for Decision Support, Web 2.0 Systems in Decision Support, and Incorporating Complex Factors in Decision Support.

This volume presents the 50 most relevant and insightful research papers amongst the contributions accepted for presentation and discussion at the conference.

The papers are organized into 13 themes:

Understanding Decision Making

Design of Decision Support Systems

Web 2.0 Systems in Decision Support

Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing

Applications of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis

Intelligent Decision Making

Context in Decision Making

Knowledge Management

ERP Systems

Decision Support for Policy Making

Decision Making in Emergency Scenarios

Decision Support in Commerce

Decision Support for Production Planning

As editors, we express our gratitude to everyone who contributed to the realization of this book, namely, all authors, members of the steering committee, members of the program committee, and reviewers. We also acknowledge the supports of CIO, University of Lisbon.

Ana Respício, DSS 2010 Chair

Frederic Adam, DSS 2010 Program Co-chair

Gloria Phillips-Wren, DSS 2010 Program Co-chair

Carlos Teixeira, DSS 2010 Organizing Committee

João Telhada, DSS 2010 Organizing Committee