Ronald M. North President Universities Council on Water Resources People sense intuitively that the world in which we live is not free of risk. Every decision, every action, even the refusal to either act or decide involves some element of risk. Perhaps, because we accept relatively low levels of risk in our daily activi ties, we tend to minimize the existence of risk and thereby fail to include risk assessment in those decisions and actions which could be improved through a risk assessment process. However, our casual approach to risk assessment seems to stem largely from the diffi culties...

The subject area of the volume is multiple criteria decision making (MCDM), which is concerned with the methods and techniques by which multiple conflicting objectives can be formally incorporated into the management planning process. Constituting the selected proceedings of the most recent International Conference on Multiple Criteria Decision Making, the forty-five articles in the volume provide significant content on the latest in developments and new ideas taking place in theory and practice of the rapidly growing field of MCDM.

The Sixth International Multiple-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) Conference is one of a biennial series that serve as a forum for exchange of the latest information and new developments in this rapidly growing field. Participants are carefully chosen from among scholars and practitioners so that widely ranging perspectives and disciplines are represented; this insures the dissemination of valuable new know ledge to those scholars, policy-makers and industrial analysts who will best utilize and share it, both in developed and in third-world countries. The Sixth Internaitona1 MCDM Conference...

Presents systems-based theory, methodology, and applications in risk modeling, assessment, and management

This book examines risk analysis, focusing on quantifying risk and constructing probabilities for real-world decision-making, including engineering, design, technology, institutions, organizations, and policy. The author presents fundamental concepts (hierarchical holographic modeling; state space; decision analysis; multi-objective trade-off analysis) as well as advanced material (extreme events and the partitioned multi-objective risk method; multi-objective decision...