Introduction

Decision making in organizations is a recurrent theme, essential for business continuity. Managers from various fields including public, private, industrial, trading, or service sectors are required to make decisions. Consequently, managers need the support of these structured methods in order to engage in effective decision making. In order to provide a comprehensive overview of various methods and applications in decision engineering, this book presents chapters written by a range of experts in the field. It presents conceptual aspects of decision support applications in various areas including finance, supplier selection, civil engineering, process management, water and energy management, agribusiness, public policies, production scheduling and control, and waste management. In addition to this, a special focus is given to methods of multiple criteria decision making. This chapter has the purpose to introduce the other chapters presenting the main approaches of models for decision making in engineering and management areas.