The organizers of the 12th International Conference on Multiple Cri- teria Decision Making (MCDM) held June 19-23, 1995 in Hagen received the second time the opportunity to prepare an international conference on MCDM in Germany; the first opportunity has been the 3rd International Conference on MCDM in Konigswinter, 1979. Quite a time ellapsed since then and therefore it might be interesting to compare some indicators of the development of the International Society on MCDM, which has been founded in Konigswinter. Stanley Zionts has been elected first president and all 44 participants of that...

He consider a cone dominance problem: given a "preference" cone lP and a set n X R of available, or feasible, alternatives, the problem is to identify the non dominated elements of X. The nonzero elements of lP are assumed to model the do- nance structure of the problem so that y s X dominates x s X if Y = x + P for some nonzero p S lP. Consequently, x S X is nondominated if, and only if, ( + lP) n X = (1.1) He will also refer to nondominated points as efficient points (in X with respect to lP) and we will let EF(XJP) denote the set of such efficient points. This cone dominance problem...