Application of Evidence Theory and Discounting Techniques to Aerospace Design

Critical decisions are made by decision-makers throughout<br/>the life-cycle of large-scale projects. These decisions are crucial as they<br/>have a direct impact upon the outcome and the success of projects. To aid<br/>decision-makers in the decision making process we present an evidential<br/>reasoning framework. This approach utilizes the Dezert-Smarandache<br/>theory to fuse heterogeneous evidence sources that suffer from levels<br/>of uncertainty, imprecision and conflicts to provide beliefs for decision<br/>options. To analyze the impact of source reliability and priority upon<br/>the decision making process, a reliability discounting technique and a<br/>priority discounting technique, are applied. A maximal consistent subset<br/>is constructed to aid in dening where discounting should be applied.<br/>Application of the evidential reasoning framework is illustrated using a<br/>case study based in the Aerospace domain.