ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the nature, type, and scope of decisions. It discusses the decision-making process and the techniques used for making decisions. Five broad DSS categories are explained including data-driven, model-driven, communications-driven, document-driven, knowledge-driven, and decision support systems (DSS). Organizational decision-making seeks to find the optimal or most satisfactory solution for a decision problem such as selecting the best from a set of product prototypes, making an optimized resource plan, choosing the most suitable supplier and determining a product's price. Different decision-making tasks may have different features and therefore are modeled in different forms or presented by different methods, and solved by different decision support techniques. The decision tree approach, as a decision support tool, models a decision problem and its possible consequences in a tree-like graph. Research results include new methodologies and algorithms for fuzzy multi-objective decision-making, fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making, fuzzy case-based reasoning, fuzzy decision trees, fuzzy data retrieval, and fuzzy association rules.
