Application of Evidence Theory and Discounting Techniques to Aerospace Design

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