Individuals, organizations, and governments are often expected to make
decisions of far-reaching consequences. Judgment and decision-making
capabilities are important facets of human intelligence. Systematic st
udies of these topics have commenced only in the 1960s. Simultaneous d
evelopments in computer hardware and software and in fields such as ar
tificial intelligence have given impetus to the study of human decisio
n making from descriptive, normative, and prescriptive points of view.
Real-world decision problems am often unstructured and difficult to f
ormulate. There am multiple objectives, distributed decision makers an
d difficulties in acquiring different types of knowledge needed for pr
oblem solving. Human knowledge is often available in natural language
with its inherent ambiguity and vagueness. While a human being has onl
y ''bounded rationality, '' his intuition and common sense enable him
to make good decisions in using qualitative nonnumerical information i
n narrow domains of expertise such as medical diagnosis. He has to be
supported by decision aids when confronted with situations in complex
systems. In this paper, we briefly review decision making in complex s
ystems from the point of view of intelligent decision support systems,
which applications to the project management task.