Matthias Ehrgott Knihy

In the twenty-first century the sustainability of energy and transportation systems is on the top of the political agenda in many countries around the world. Environmental impacts of human economic activity necessitate the consideration of conflicting goals in decision making processes to develop sustainable systems. Any sustainable development has to reconcile conflicting economic and environmental objectives and criteria. The science of multiple criteria decision making has a lot to offer in addressing this need. Decision making with multiple (conflicting) criteria is the topic of research that is at the heart of the International Society of Multiple Criteria Decision Making. This book is based on selected papers presented at the societies 19th International Conference, held at The University of Auckland, New Zealand, from 7th to 12th January 2008 under the theme "MCDM for Sustainable Energy and Transportation Systems''.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Evolutionary Multi-Criterion Optimization, EMO 2009, held in Nantes, France in April 2009. The 39 revised full papers presented together with 5 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 72 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on theoretical analysis, uncertainty and noise, algorithm development, performance analysis and comparison, applications, MCDM Track, Many objectives, alternative methods, as well as EMO and MCDA.

Life is about decisions. Decisions, no matter if made by a group or an indi vidual, involve several conflicting objectives. The observation that real world problems have to be solved optimally according to criteria, which prohibit an „ideal“ solution - optimal for each decision-maker under each of the criteria considered - has led to the development of multicriteria optimization. From its first roots, which where laid by Pareto at the end of the 19th century the discipline has prospered and grown, especially during the last three decades. Today, many decision support systems incorporate methods to deal with conflicting objectives. The foundation for such systems is a mathematical theory of optimization under multiple objectives. Fully aware of the fact that there have been excellent textbooks on the topic before, I do not claim that this is better text, but it has a has a consid erably different focus. Some of the available books develop the mathematical background in great depth, such as [SNT85, GN90, Jah86). Others focus on a specific structure of the problems covered as [Zel74, Ste85, Mie99) or on methodology [Yu85, CH83a, HM79). Finally there is the area of multicriteria decision aiding [Roy96, Vin92, KR93), the main goal of which is to help deci sion makers find the final solution (among many „optimal“ ones) eventually to be implemented.