The Fourth DAS Workshop on
Multiple Criteria Support in Network Centric Organizations
Istanbul, Turkey
September 2-4, 1998

One-day tutorial on
Foundations of Decision Support Methodology
Istanbul, Turkey
September 1, 1998

The Fourth DAS Workshop was organized together with Yeditepe University on the Büyükada Island in Istanbul.

In the opening session both the local hosts and IIASA representatives welcomed more than 50 participants. Professor Birsen Karpak, the initiator of this joint workshop, opened the workshop. After her, professor Altan Cöner welcomed the participants on behalf of the local organizers. Next, professor Dogan Altuner, director of the MBA Program and dean of the Business School at the Yeditepe University expressed his happiness about this new form of co-operation.

Finally, the rector of the Yeditepe University, professor Ahmed Serpil concluded the opening session. All the speakers emphasized the importance of co-operation and hoped it to continue in the future, as well.

The workshop was organized in the way that first several DAS collaborators gave tutorial presentations in order to lay a foundation for the rest of the workshop and its other presentations. On Tuesday, professor Ralph Steuer introduced the audience to Multiple Objective Programming, professor Jyrki Wallenius to Behavioral Issues in Interactive Multiple Criteria Decision Procedures and professor Murat Köksalan to Discrete Multiple Criteria Problems. The first day was brought to an end by the Saaty family: professor Thomas Saaty talked about the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for Decision Making, his wife Rozann acted as a computer specialist and their son Daniel demonstrated Team Expert Choice.

The tutorial presentations continued on Wednesday morning when Analyzing and Improving Efficiency in Organizations was the topic of professor Pekka Korhonen. The tutorial was concluded by professor Jaap Spronk who talked about Financial Modelling and A Multicriteria Risk Management Framework.

The rest two and a half days were devoted to shorter presentations by DAS collaborators and Turkish contributors. The DAS collaborators were Jeffrey Teich, Kaisa Miettinen, Raimo Hämäläinen, Birsen Karpak, Freerk Lootsma, Hirotaka Nakayama, Per Agrell, Serpil Sayin and Tom Morin. They described their research results on the topics like WWW-Decision Support Systems, Preference Modeling and Efficiency Analysis in MCDM/DEA.

The Turkish contributors treated mainly different application areas giving an overview about problems of particular interest in Turkey. Among the topics were transportation planning and investment, rail-transit networks, political risk in emerging markets, resource allocation, collaborative design, analysis of consumer characteristics, Turkish electrical tariffs, fuzzy economics and quality control. At the end of the workshop professor Thomas Saaty gave a presentations about Decision Making, Creativity and Problem Solving.

Several different possibilities of further co-operation between the DAS Project and the Yeditepe University were discussed in the course of the workshop. Yeditepe University is a new two-year-old university that is actively seeking for joint work and new contacts. One point raised was also the possibility of Turkey becoming a member of IIASA. This idea was supported by many.

The workshop was attended by more that 50 participants. The conference program was tight with days full of presentations: 6 tutorials and 22 other talks. As professor Pekka Korhonen mentioned in his closing words, this workshop was particularly exceptional in one respect - the number of cancelled presentations was zero!

In his closing remarks, professor Korhonen thanked the local organizers for their excellent job in the organization of the DAS Workshop and for providing such an opportunity to meet people and create new contacts. The workshop was professionally a success. All the participants will certainly also remember the marvelous social program in the evenings. This included a boat tour and an outdoor dinner at Aya Yorgi, where the city of Istanbul could be admired.

PS. The links to the speakers contain photos, not homepages.

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