This volume contains a selection of the papers presented at the 16th IFIP Working Group 8.3 International Conference on Decision Support Systems (DSS).

The IFIP Working Group 8.3 conferences have been held biannually since 1982. The aim of these forums is to create an environment for the audience interested in current advancements in the area of Decision Support Systems (DSS) and Decision Making (DM) to come together to present their ideas on new approaches, review the latest innovations, and discuss relevant applications. The topics for each event have been specific to timely cutting-edge issues, and have included theories, systems, methodologies, algorithms, techniques, applications and technologies suitable for 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 into 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. In Toulouse (France) in 2008, participants were asked to reflect on collaborative decision making, presenting latest advances and discussing the multiple facets and challenges of collaborative decision support. At the close of the first decade of the 21st century in 2010, in Lisbon (Portugal), participants were challenged to focus on the reduction of the great divide between the social activities that researchers and practitioners aim to support and those that are actually supported by DSS.

Following these traditions, it is now timely to explore the socio-technical approaches for fusing decision support, as well as opportunities and obstacles for achieving a total fusion of DSS systems in various contexts.

The conference took its prompt from the keynote by Omar El Sawy and ideas presented in his article titled “The 3 Faces of IS Identity: Connection, Immersion, and Infusion”, which originally appeared in 2003 in Communications of the AIS, volume 12. In his keynote for DSS'2010 conference, Omar El Sawy put forward the argument that “DSS has disappeared in the fabric of organizations: long live DSS”. According to this argument, DSS researchers and developers have to achieve a total alignment with the implementation contexts, both organizational and personal, in order to attain the best fit with users' preferences, behaviors and working contexts. The advantage of such a fusion view of information systems, and specifically DSS, is an opportunity for seamless integration between enterprise environments and decision support system components.

The conference solicited papers describing the application of fusion principles to DSS research and practice. The original research papers submitted to the conference covered a wide variety of topics. These topics included inter- and intra-organizational issues in fusion of DSS; fusion models for business intelligence and data warehousing; decision support fusion for organisational production planning and supply chain management; DSS fusion for emergency management; application of knowledge management for better decision support; context models for real-world decision support; intelligent approaches for fusion of decision support; fusing principles for collaborative, negotiation support and group support systems; context-based decision models, social technologies and web-based approaches in fusing decision support; incorporating complex factors in context-based decision support; fusion of decision support in specific contexts and application domains; and research methods and issues within modern DSS.

This volume of proceedings contains only research papers that were selected as a result of a review process involving at least two reviewers appointed by the program chairs. We would like to thank the reviewers for their contribution to the quality of the material presented in this book. We would also like to thank the authors for their enthusiastic contribution and effort in revising the papers to address the comments and recommendations of the reviewers.

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

In addition to contributed papers, the program also included the following keynote presentations from the local and international distinguished researchers:

• Personalization in web search and data management, presented by Professor Timos Sellis (joint work with T. Dalamagas, G. Giannopoulos and A. Arvanitis) Research Center “Athena” and National Technical University of Athens, Greece;

• What's communication got to do with IT?, presented by Professor Dov Te'eni, Tel-Aviv University, Israel, President of the Association for Information Systems;

• Multicriteria decision support in financial decision making: An overview and a case study on bank rating, presented by Professor Constantin Zopounidis and Michael Doumpos, Technical University of Crete, Greece.

As editors, we would like to thank everyone who contributed to the content and production of this book, namely, all the authors, keynote speakers, members of the steering committee, members of the program committee, reviewers, and, last but not least, we would like to acknowledge the effort of the organizers of the conference and their university, without whom this conference would have not been possible. We would also like to thank Maarten Fröhlich from IOS Press for his availability and collaboration.

Ana Respício and Frada Burstein, DSS'2012 Program Co-chairs

Anávissos, Greece, June 28–30, 2012