This volume presents the state of the art of new developments, and some interesting and relevant applications of the OWA (ordered weighted averaging) operators. The OWA operators were introduced in the early 1980s by Ronald R. Yager as a conceptually and numerically simple, easily implementable, yet extremely powerful general aggregation operator. That simplicity, generality and implementability of the OWA operators, combined with their intuitive appeal, have triggered much research both in the foundations and extensions of the OWA operators, and in their applications to a wide variety of problems in various fields of science and technology. Part I: Methods includes papers on theoretical foundations of OWA operators and their extensions. The papers in Part II: Applications show some more relevant applications of the OWA operators, mostly means, as powerful yet general aggregation operators. The application areas are exemplified by environmental modeling, social networks, image analysis, financial decision making and water resource management.

Aggregation plays a central role in many of the technological tasks we are faced with. The importance of this process will become even greater as we move more and more toward becoming an information-cent.ered society, us is happening with the rapid growth of the Internet and the World Wirle Weh. Here we shall be faced with many issues related to the fusion of information. One very pressing issue here is the development of mechanisms to help search for information, a problem that clearly has a strong aggregation-related component. More generally, in order to model the sophisticated ways in which human beings process information, as well as going beyond the human capa bilities, we need provide a basket of aggregation tools. The centrality of aggregation in human thought can be be very clearly seen by looking at neural networks, a technology motivated by modeling the human brain. One can see that the basic operations involved in these networks are learning and aggregation. The Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) operators provide a parameter ized family of aggregation operators which include many of the well-known operators such as the maximum, minimum and the simple average.

This volume presents the state of the art of new developments, and some interesting and relevant applications of the OWA (ordered weighted averaging) operators. The OWA operators were introduced in the early 1980s by Ronald R. Yager as a conceptually and numerically simple, easily implementable, yet extremely powerful general aggregation operator. That simplicity, generality and implementability of the OWA operators, combined with their intuitive appeal, have triggered much research both in the foundations and extensions of the OWA operators, and in their applications to a wide variety of problems in various fields of science and technology. Part I: Methods includes papers on theoretical foundations of OWA operators and their extensions. The papers in Part II: Applications show some more relevant applications of the OWA operators, mostly means, as powerful yet general aggregation operators. The application areas are exemplified by environmental modeling, social networks, image analysis, financial decision making and water resource management.

This book gathers the contributions of the international conference “Optimization and Decision Science” (ODS2018), which was held at the Hotel Villa Diodoro, Taormina (Messina), Italy on September 10 to 13, 2018, and was organized by AIRO, the Italian Operations Research Society, in cooperation with the DMI (Department of Mathematics and Computer Science) of the University of Catania (Italy). The book offers state-of-the-art content on optimization, decisions science and problem solving methods, as well as their application in industrial and territorial systems. It highlights a range of real-world problems that are both challenging and worthwhile, using models and methods based on continuous and discrete optimization, network optimization, simulation and system dynamics, heuristics, metaheuristics, artificial intelligence, analytics, and multiple-criteria decision making. Given its scope of coverage, it will benefit not only researchers and practitioners working in these areas, but also the operations research community as a whole.

This book contains the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Modeling and Simulation in Engineering, Economics, and Management, MS 2013, held in Castellón de la Plana, Spain, in June 2013. The event was co-organized by the AMSE Association and the SoGReS Research Group of the Jaume I University. This edition of the conference paid special attention to modeling and simulation in diverse fields of business management. The 28 full papers in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 65 submissions. They are organized in topical sections on: modeling and simulation in CSR and sustainable development; modeling and simulation in finance and accounting; modeling and simulation in management and marketing; modeling and simulation in economics and politics; knowledge-based expert and decision support systems; and modeling and simulation in engineering.

This book contains the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Modeling and Simulation in Engineering, Economics, and Management, MS 2012, held in New Rochelle, NY, USA, in May/June 2012. The event was co-organized by the AMSE Association and Iona College. The 27 full papers in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 78 submissions. In addition to these papers a summary of the plenary presentation given by Ronald R. Yager is also included. The book mainly focuses on the field of intelligent systems and its application to economics and business administration. Some papers have a stronger orientation towards modeling and simulation in these fields.