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 international conference presented a microcosm of peoples and new ideas that reflected the extraordinary events that were to take place in Europe and other parts of the world during that summer of 1990. with the theme: "Multiple criteria Decision Making and support at the Interface of Industry, Business and Government" we wanted to focus on new analytical methodologies and management tools, quantitative and qualitative evaluation of decision techniques, the design of experiments to test existing and proposed methods, and the experience gained in the application of these MCDM methods and tools to real-world problems during the last 10-15 years. Many analytical, behavioral, and technological advances are to be made, we feel, at the interface of MCDM Theory, the Behavioral Sciences, operations Research, Systems Engineering, Decision Theory, Mathematical Sciences, and Information Technology. viii The current proliferation of computer-based decision tools offers new challenges and opportunities.
