Preface

Abstract

This issue is devoted mostly to applications of multiple criteria decision making, data mining, knowledge acquisition, and other advanced information technologies to telecommunications and other network services, but includes also a paper on strategies of telecommunication technology migration, one on measuring highly doped optical fibers and one on e-learning. 
The first paper by Krzysztof Bareja and Włodzimierz Ogryczak from the Warsaw University of Technology presents an outline of a decision support framework based on the concept of reference distributions. This concept is particularly suitable for decision problems with a large number of criteria that have the same character, such as quality of service perceived by each individual user of a telecommunication network, or any other system which serve many users where quality of service for every individual user defines the criteria; in particular, such problems arise when analyzing facility location problems. Distribution of such criteria for a given design of the system can serve as a kind of criteria trajectory and be compared with a reference trajectory or distribution; diverse techniques of fair mulicriteria optimization can be used then to select the best design of the system. (...)