Special issue on soft or and complex societal problems

Abstract

Preface by the guest editorIt is really troublesome to show how formal planning support tools can contribute to deal with large scale public problems that appear in education, health, safety, human development and infrastructure services.Rational analysts find great difficulties to construct models to help making decisions about public problems. To the point that either rational or social and political analysts are sceptical about the possibility and efficacy of formal models implementation.However, some OR researchers have been facing the challenge under the designation of Soft Operational Research, also known as Problem Structuring Methods, to deal with Complex Societal Problems.