Planning Support Science: challenges, themes and applications

Abstract

This introductory chapter has two main objectives. First, it acknowledges the rapidly changing world that we live in and summarises some of the mega trends, challenges and risks at different scales that provide the context for the development of the sub-discipline that we now refer to as planning support science and the planning support systems (PSS) that have been created. Second, the rationale for the sequence of the remaining chapters in this handbook that have been grouped into key themes is explained and a short resumé of each chapter is presented that outlines the objectives and key contributions in each case. Several of the chapters report on particular PSS applications.