Special Issue on “Innovative Approaches for Decision Analysis in Energy, Health, and Life Sciences”

The 22nd European Conference on Operational Research EURO2007 took place in Prague, Czech Republic, organised by the Czech Society of Operational Research and the University of Economics in Prague. The conference participants were researchers, academicians, and practitioners interested in operational research, mathematical modelling and quantitative economic analysis. The number of participants was higher than 2,000 persons form various countries of the world, making the Prague conference the largest EURO conference ever. The high number of conference participants is a sign promising that Operations Research (OR) is an attractive scientific discipline with many new theoretical developments and practical applications. In 2005, a special issue of the Central European Journal of Operations Research has been devoted to quantitative decision support for health care (cf. CEJOR 2005). This special issue is devoted to innovative approaches for decision analysis in energy, health, and life sciences. One may ask what these different topics have in common? The answer is that they represent key major challenging application fields for researchers that containmanymeasurement, definition, and interpretation problems which are complicated by dynamic and stochastic structure of the studied systems.