A special issue on decision intelligence with soft computing

Abstract

Decision intelligence brings together traditional business intelligence and decision support systems (DSS) to improve complex, dynamic, uncertain, and un-structured decision problems. Intelligent DSS, along with knowledge-based decision analysis methods, incorporating databases/data warehouses, model bases and intellectual resources, have been well developed. Decision intelligence systems can remove the need to always store data first in a database/data warehouse before it can be used for decision-making. It therefore enables organizations to better understand their dynamic business processes and the factors that affect business performance, which leads to better decisions. There are a growing number of requirements to deal with the complexity, dynamicity, uncertainty, and un-structure of decision problems. Soft computing, including the techniques of fuzzy logic, rough sets, neural networks, evolutionary computing, swarm intelligence and other similar approaches, have been recently applied in related areas to meet the requirements. Research results show that applying soft computing into decision intelligence effectively improves the intelligent features of the decision process and the quality of decision-making. Some successful applications of these techniques have appeared in various decision problems. Therefore, an updated overview for theoretical research results and practical developments of soft computing in decision intelligence will benefit researchers, businesses, governments, and other organizations. This special issue provides a high quality forum of the state-of-the-art research and development in line with decision intelligence and soft computing. It was generated from the 2008 International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Knowledge Engineering (ISKE2008, 17–18 November 2008, Xiamen, China) by selecting 9 high quality relevant papers in the scope of the special issue from more than 200 papers in the conference proceedings. The special issue covers both benefits and challenges in this area and draws on the authors’ wide-ranging practical experience of strategy development in the field. It provides both a theoretical grounding and practical approaches in the use of soft computing techniques to real-world decision problems, from road safety, breast cancer morbidity, and fashion design to telecommunication customer services. Contributed authors from Australia, Belgium, China, France, Japan, and Spain demonstrate their new research results on how soft computing technologies benefit the development of decision intelligence.