High-level decisions from low-level data

Decision-makers long for information that will make their decision processes easy and accurate. A methodology is proposed which begins with low information-content data, such as that derived from system testing, and aggregates/synthesizes the information to a higher information-content level, where it is meaningful to the decision-maker. The entire methodology, termed the intelligent hierarchical decision architecture, is composed of four stages which takes low level test data gathered at the functional performance information level as input and the final output is a probabilistic bound on the system performance at the operational task-accomplishment information level