**Preface to "Sustainability Analysis and Environmental Decision-Making Using Simulation, Optimization, and Computational Analytic"**

In practice, environmental analytics incorporates an amalgamation of science, methods, and techniques that combines computational intelligence, information technology, mathematical modelling, system science, and computer technology to address "real-world"environmental and sustainability problems. Effective environmental decision-making is often challenging and complex, where final solutions frequently possess inherently subjective political and socio-economic components. In addition, while certain environmental and sustainability decision-making aspects might appear self-evident, more typical problems possess elements that cannot be directly included in the underlying decision process without additional manipulation. Such decision-making can be further complicated by accompanying stochastic uncertainties. Consequently, complex sustainability applications in the "real world"frequently employ computational decision-making approaches to construct solutions to problems containing numerous quantitative dimensions and considerable sources of uncertainty.

This volume includes a number of such applied computational analytics papers that either create new decision-making methods or provide innovative implementations of existing methods for addressing a wide spectrum of sustainability applications, broadly defined. The rich diversity of applications within the papers exemplifies the considerable range of both methodological relevance and practical contributions to research in environmental analysis. The disparate contributions all emphasize novel approaches of computational analytics as applied to environmental decision-making and sustainability analysis –be this on the side of optimization, simulation, modelling, computational solution procedures, visual analytics, and/or information technologies.

> **Mariia Kozlova, Julian Scott Yeomans** *Editors*
