**About the Editors**

**V´ıctor Yepes** is a full professor of Construction Engineering; he holds a Ph.D. degree in civil engineering. He serves at the Department of Construction Engineering, Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Valencia, Spain. He has been the Academic Director of the M.S. studies in concrete materials and structures since 2007 and a Member of the Concrete Science and Technology Institute (ICITECH). He is currently involved in several projects related to the optimization and life-cycle assessment of concrete structures as well as optimization models for infrastructure asset management. He is currently teaching courses in construction methods, innovation, and quality management. He authored more than 250 journals and conference papers including more than 100 published in journals quoted in JCR. He acted as an Expert for project proposals evaluation for the Spanish Ministry of Technology and Science, and he is a main researcher in many projects. He currently serves as an Editor-in-Chief of the *International Journal of Construction Engineering and Management* and a member of the editorial board of 12 international journals (*Structure & Infrastructure Engineering*, *Structural Engineering and Mechanics*, *Mathematics*, *Sustainability*, *Revista de la Construcci´on*, *Advances in Civil Engineering*, *Advances in Concrete Construction*, among others).

**Jos ´e M. Moreno-Jim ´enez** is a full professor of Operations Research and Multicriteria Decision Making, and has received degrees in mathematics and economics as well as a Ph.D. degree in applied mathematics from the University of Zaragoza, Spain; where he has been teaching the course since 1980–1981. He is the Head of the Quantitative Methods Area in the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Zaragoza from 1997, the Chair of the Zaragoza Multicriteria Decision Making Group from 1996, a member of the Advisory Board of the Euro Working Group on Decision Support Systems from 2017, and a Honorary Member of the International Society on Applied Economics ASEPELT from 2019. He has also been the President of an international scientific society (2014–2018) and the Coordinator of the Spanish Multicriteria Decision Making Group (2012–2015). His research interests are in the general area of Operations Research theory and practice, with emphasis on multicriteria decision making, electronic democracy/cognocracy, performance analysis, and industrial and technological diversification. He has published more than 250 papers in scientific books and journals in the most prestigious editorials and is a member of the editorial board of several national and international journals.

#### **Preface to "Optimization for Decision Making II"**

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 an asynchronous manner.

To help address and resolve these types of questions, this book comprises 16 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 II" Special Issue of the *Mathematics* journal, 2020, 8(6), first decile of the JCR 2019 in the Mathematics category.

We would like to thank both the MDPI publishing and editorial staff for their excellent work, as well as the 51 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, 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 M. Moreno-Jim´enez** *Editors*
