It gives us great pleasure to invite you to Ljubljana, Slovenia, for the 2018 Open Conference of the IFIP WG 8.3 on Decision Support Systems. The theme of the conference “DSS Research Delivering High Impacts to Business and Society” highlights the main purpose of the DSS: providing support to people and organisations faced with difficult decision problems in a variety of contexts. This requires applying the DSS expertise to problems that arise in other disciplines, such as healthcare, specific business areas, media, and many others. The DSS researchers should collaborate with other domains of expertise and leverage the DSS expertise to solve other people’s problems.

On this basis, we aim to continue the success of past IFIP WG 8.3 conferences in supporting the dissemination of quality research, but also to provide a memorable experience through our hospitality and conference facilities in Ljubljana, the European Green Capital 2016. The 2018 IFIP WG 8.3 conference is organised by Jožef Stefan Institute, the largest Slovenian research institute, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the 1998 IFIP WG 8.3 conference that was held in Bled, Slovenia.

The IFIP WG 8.3 conference committee welcomes both academic and practitioner community contributions on a wide range of topics using a range of scholarly approaches that showcase the latest innovations and achievements in decision support and decision making. Submitted contributions that showcase methodological advances and real case studies will be especially welcomed. All contributions will be peer-reviewed and the acceptance of a contribution will be based on the originality of the work, the relevance to the conference theme and its overall quality.

The 2018 Open Conference of the IFIP WG 8.3 will highlight the applications, methods, analytics, stakeholders and impacts of decision making and decision support in today’s society and business. Suggested research topics (presented as conceptual/theoretical, empirical, design science and case-based approaches, amongst others) can include, but are not limited to:

Decision Support, Methodologies, Systems & Software
Decision Making, Behaviours, Data & Decision Models
Business Analytics, Intelligence & Knowledge Discovery
Conference Publications

Intending participants in the 2018 Open Conference of the IFIP WG 8.3 are invited to make a submission for consideration for presentation at the conference and publication in its proceedings. Submissions must be original contributions that have not been previously published. All accepted submissions will be published in the proceedings, provided that the final version is received by the due date and the submission is formatted as specified on the conference website. Accepted submissions will be published where there is a unique author registration (to attend the conference) for each submission. Full academic research papers will be presented in regular sessions, while posters will be presented in poster sessions.

Following a tradition of the IFIP WG8.3 conferences, authors of best papers will be invited to submit extended versions to special issues of international scientific journals such as JDS.