**Preface to "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.

To help address and resolve these types of questions, this book comprises 13 chapters that present a series of decision models, methods, and techniques and their practical applications in the fields of economics, engineering, and social sciences. The chapters collect the papers included in the "Optimization for Decision Making" Special Issue of the *Mathematics* journal, 2019, 7(3), first decile of the JCR 2019 in the Mathematics category.

We would like to thank both the MDPI publishing editorial team, for their excellent work, and the 47 authors who have collaborated in its preparation. The papers cover a wide spectrum of issues related to the scientific resolution of problems; in particular, related to decision making, optimization, metaheuristics, simulation, and multi-criteria decision-making.

We hope that the papers, with their undoubted mathematical content, can be of use to academics and professionals from the many branches of knowledge (philosophy, psychology, economics, mathematics, decision science, computer science, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and more) that have, from such diverse perspectives, approached the study of decision-making, an essential aspect of human life and development.

> **V´ıctor Yepes, Jos´e Mar´ıa Moreno-Jim´enez** *Editors*

*Article*
