A COMPARATIVE-STUDY IN DSS DEVELOPMENT

This feature issue of the European Journal of Operational Research pre sents the results of an international comparative study in the develop ment of decision support systems. The study was held in the period 198 7-1990 and coordinated by the International Institute for Applied Syst ems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria. Teams from Budapest, Cracow/Warsaw , Eindhoven, Genoa, Poznan, Udine/Brescia and Wroclaw developed decisi on support systems for a resource constrained project scheduling probl em; a team from Moscow investigated some structural properties of the problem. Although not all of the goals of the study were fully realize d, the study was generally viewed as a worthwhile effort. The reports by seven teams are collected here. Section 1 of this editorial describ es the history and goals of the study. In Section 2 we sketch the prob lem type in question and discuss the functional aspects of a decision support system for operational planning. We evaluate the study in Sect ion 3 and give some conclusions in Section 4.