In bringing together this book, the editors have kept two goals in mind. Firstly, the goal of educating the reader by giving an insight into the wealth of computing and mathematical techniques now being used to build decision support systems. Secondly, of aiming to stimulate the imagination by including an eclectic mix of contributions from a wide range of business areas to demonstrate that there is no field in which modern decision support techniques cannot usefully be applied. The quintessence of decision support systems is that they are designed to assist people in establishing the best course of action in a given situation but not to automate or tell them prescriptively how to achieve a goal.
