It seems suitable to introduce this special issue by giving a few brushstrokes to frame the Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) paradigm within a historical perspective. In this direction, we consider that the starting point of the MCDM movement was possibly in 1951, when Koopmans established the concept of efficient or non-dominated vector that was later developed by Kuhn and Tucker to obtain the optimality conditions for the existence of non-dominated solutions. Following another direction, Charnes and Cooper, in 1955 and 1961, introduced the basic idea of goal programming, first within a constrained regression context, and second for addressing the issue of incompatibilities among constraints of linear programming problems. There are also remarkable precursors to this paradigm, like the introduction in 1968 of the outranking relationships as a foundation of the ELECTRE methods by Roy, as well as the publication one year later by Raiffa of a memorandum of the RAND Corporation, where the seminal ideas of the multi-attribute utility theory were introduced. These fundamental contributions clearly indicate that since its origins MCDM is firmly rooted with the classic optimization principles, which the new paradigm aims to extend and to increase its empirical corroboration capacity. In other words, MCDM aims to increase the understanding of how people make decisions, as well as to provide decision makers with sound analytical tools to aid in making sensible decisions.

During the 1960s, the above outlined seminal ideas evolved slowly. However, there was not a lot of enthusiasm for MCDM during that decade. The crucial moment or turning point for MCDM was October 1972 when the First International Conference on MCDM was held at the University of South Carolina. The actual pioneers of the MCDM movement attended this historical conference. They were young scientists in their early thirties presenting results derived from their PhD dissertations. Besides these young scientists, some big figures in classic optimization also attended and contributed to this memorable conference. A non-exhaustive list of the “Young Turks” (understanding by this term a group of young intellectuals, including John Maynard Keynes, who were graduate students at King’s College, Cambridge, and who led, in the early 20th century, a protest movement aiming to change the Victorian norms ruling the King’s) would include, among others in alphabetic order, Dyer, Ignizio, Ijiri, Keeney, Steuer, Yu, and Zeleny.