Preface

Abstract

The Fifth International Conference on Decision Support for Telecommunications and Information Society DSTIS-2005, organized by the National Institute of Telecommunications in Warsaw (1st-2nd September, 2006), was an opportunity to bring together researchers working on optimization and decision support for telecommunications industry and information society.
The first paper presents a reflection on the role of technology and, in particular, information technology in the era of knowledge civilization. Diverse perceptions of this era, the concepts of three civilization eras versus three waves, of a cultural platform versus an episteme of a civilization era, of a big change at the end of industrial civilization era are outlined. 
The next two papers are devoted to network planning. The first paper presents a variable neighborhood search (VNS) metaheuristic that is applied to solve the provisioning and routing problem in WDM networks, an integer flow formulation is modeled in AMPL and solved by CPLEX in order to obtain optimal solutions as a reference for the heuristic. The second paper shows how the concepts of multiple criteria equitable optimization can be effectively
used to generate various fair and efficient allocation schemes. The authors introduce a multiple criteria model equivalent to equitable optimization and they develop a corresponding reference point procedure for fair and efficient network dimensioning for elastic flows. The procedure was tested on a sample network dimensioning problem for elastic traffic and its abilities to model various preferences are demonstrated. (...)