Real-world decision making problems in various fields including engineering sciences are becoming ever more challenging to address. The consideration of various competing criteria related to, for example, business, technical, workforce, safety and environmental aspects increases the complexity of decision making and leads to problems that feature multiple competing criteria. A key challenge in such problems is the identification of the most preferred trade-off solution(s) with respect to the competing criteria. Therefore, the effective combination of data, skills, and advanced engineering and management technologies is becoming a key asset to a company urging the need to rethink how to tackle modern decision making problems. This special issue focuses on the intersection between engineering, multiple criteria decision making, multiobjective optimization, and data science. The development of new models and algorithmic methods to solve such problems is in the focus as much as the application of these concepts to real problems. This special issue was motivated by the 25th International Conference on Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM2019) held in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2019.

解决包括工程科学在内的各个领域的现实决策问题变得越来越具有挑战性。考虑与例如业务，技术，劳动力，安全和环境方面有关的各种竞争标准会增加决策的复杂性，并导致出现具有多个竞争标准的问题。在此类问题中的主要挑战是就竞争标准确定最优选的折衷解决方案。因此，数据，技能以及先进的工程和管理技术的有效结合正成为公司的一项重要资产，要求公司重新考虑如何解决现代决策问题。本期特刊侧重于工程学，多标准决策，多目标优化和数据科学。解决这些问题的新模型和算法方法的开发，以及将这些概念应用于实际问题的关注焦点。本期专刊是由2019年在土耳其伊斯坦布尔举行的第25届多标准决策国际会议（MCDM2019）推动的。