Optimization for Decision Making

Decision making is one of the distinctive activities of the human being; it is an indication of the degree of evolution, cognition, and freedom of the species. In the past, until the end of the 20th century, scientific decision-making was based on the paradigms of substantive rationality (normative approach) and procedural rationality (descriptive approach). Since the beginning of the 21st century and the advent of the Knowledge Society, decision making has been enriched with new constructivist, evolutionary, and cognitive paradigms that aim to respond to new challenges and needs; especially the integration into formal models of the intangible, subjective, and emotional aspects associated with the human factor, and the participation in decision-making processes of spatially distributed multiple actors that intervene in a synchronous or asynchronous manner.