Manfred Grauer - Böcker

These Proceedings report the scientific results of the Summer Study on Plural Rationality and Interactive Decision Processes orga­ nized jointly by the System and Decision Sciences Program of the Inter­ national Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (located in Laxenburg, Austria) and the Hungarian Committee for Applied Systems Analysis. The Study, which was held in Sopron over the period 16-26 Augus·t 1984, had a very special character. Sixty-eight researchers from sixteen coun­ tr~es participated, most of them contributing papers or experiments. In addition many members of IIASA's Young Scientists Summer Program were present. All of these participants were heavily involved in dis­ cussions; discussions that were not limited to the allotted time but extended well into the evenings and nights. By design, the Study gathered specialists from many disciplines, from philosophy and cultur­ al anthropology, through decision theory, game theory and economics, to engineering and applied mathematics. A further element of diversity was the representation of several varieties of culture, from typically Western countries, through Middle and Eastern Europe, to the Far East.

These Proceedings report the scientific results of an International Workshop on Large-Scale Modelling and Interactive Decision Analysis organized Jointly by the System and Decision Sciences Program of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA, located in Laxenburg, Austria), and the Institute for Informatics of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR (located in Berlin, GDR). The Workshop was held at a historically well-known place - the Wartburg Castl- near Eisenach (GDR). (Here Martin Luther translated the Bible into German.) More than fifty scientists representing thirteen countries participated. This Workshop is one of a series of meetings organizE!d by or In collaboration with IIASA about which two of the Lecture Notes In Economics and Mathematical Systems have already reported (Voi. 229 and Vol. 246). This time the aim of the meeting was to discuss methodological and practical problems associated with the modelling of large-scale systems and new approaches In interactive decision analysis based on advanced information processing systems.

This volume contains the proceedings of a workshop on Parallel Algorithms and Transputers of Optimization, held at the University of Siegen, Germany, plus invited papers covering topics related to this workshop. The contributions were mainly problem-oriented, and the approach revolved around the following basic question: how can the existing computing infrastructure (PCs, workstations, local area networks) of an institution or a company be used for parallel and distributed computation? The volume contains papers in four general areas: the use of massively parallel systems (data parallelism); the use of coarse-grained parallel approaches in multiprocessor systems (control parallelism); OpTiX - a system for parallel nonlinear optimization, and using concepts from nature for parallel optimization. Computational aspects of the work described were carried out on a broad spectrum of parallel architectures ranging from shared-memory vector multiprocessors to networks of PCs or workstations and distributed memory multiprocessor systems such as networks of transputers.