1 Special Focus

Nowadays information systems allow using large amounts of digital, structured data for decision making. The power and ability of hardware and software has been significantly increased. Related information and communication technology (ICT) provides a competitive advantage in various fields, such as supply chain management, logistics, marketing, telecommunications, just to name a few. It incorporates and links to information systems, planning tools for decision support as well as supporting devices. While modern ICT systems are vital components in decision making, their successful management rests on coordinated decision making using analytical methods. Simulation and optimization can be employed for, for example, pricing, procurement, distribution planning, and beyond. Efficient algorithms have been developed combining heuristics and metaheuristics with exact methods. Besides these algorithms and available data, progress is observed in sophisticated analytics tools to harness the tremendous potential of the data to improve decision making. Intelligent devices can communicate with various partners allowing access to relevant data to assist in collecting information, share product information, negotiate prices, and distribute alerts throughout concerned networks.

Decision analytics is the research and application area comprising theory, methodology, and practice to analyze and support important managerial decisions in a formal manner. The methods include models for optimization of one or more goals, decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, techniques of risk analysis and risk assessment, techniques for facilitating group decision making as well as software and expert systems for decision support. Special tools can be used for representing and formally assessing important aspects of decisions, so that they help decision-makers to leverage the knowledge hidden within organizational data. Methods and tools involve data mining, optimization, simulation modeling, pattern recognition, prescriptive methods, predictive modeling, and performance management.

The special focus issue strives to explore the synergies between decision analytics and information systems. It serves as a forum for researchers and practitioners to disseminate high-quality original research as well as case-studies of real-world analytics tasks in a leading international journal. Topics of interest include but are not limited to business applications in the areas:

  • Applied probability and stochastic processes

  • Business intelligence and business analytics

  • Business simulation

  • Data mining and knowledge discovery

  • Decision support systems

  • Forecasting

  • Fuzzy decision-making

  • Group decision-making

  • Heuristics, metaheuristics, and matheuristics

  • Knowledge-based systems

  • Multiple-criteria analysis

  • Optimization systems and applications

  • Risk analysis

  • Robustness and sensitivity analysis

  • Text analytics/Text mining

  • Uncertainty modeling

  • Web Analytics

2 Submission

Authors are asked to submit their papers online under the category “BISE Decision Analytics” by 2013-07-01 via Springer’s submission system Editorial Manager (http://www.editorialmanager.com/buis/). All papers must follow the typing and formatting instructions for WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK/Business & Information Systems Engineering (BISE) available at http://www.bise-journal.org. In particular, manuscripts should not exceed 50,000 characters (discounting 5,000 characters for each figure/table).

Submitted papers will undergo a double-blind review process and be refereed by at least three domain experts according to quality, originality, relevance, and scientific rigor.

3 Schedule

Paper submission due: 2013-07-01

Notification of authors: 2013-08-26

Revisions due: 2013-10-28

Notification of authors: 2013-12-16

Completion of a second revision (if needed): 2014-01-20

Anticipated publication data: June 2014