Ambitious as the enterprise was, and as demanding as the planning effort promised to be, we set out to organize the IX International Conference on Multiple criteria Decision Making (MCDM) which took place in Fairfax, Virginia, on August 5-8, 1990. We knew it was ambitious because the number of participants expected to attend the conference would approach 160, larger than that of earlier conferences, and because it would include a sizable contingent of 39 participants from the soviet union and Eastern Europe, possibly the largest yet. In many ways, it may be appropriate to say, this...

Roughly nine years ago, the two editors met for the first time in Amsterdam, the Netherlands at the EURO III meeting (organized by the Association of European Operational Research Societies) there. As a result of our initial meeting, the two of us planned and carried out a number of activities in the multiple criteria decision making area, much of it supported by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The latest of these activities was a NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) on multiple criteria. decision making and risk analysis using microcomputers. The institute was held in Tarabya,...