Information fusion and discounting techniques for decision support in Aerospace

Decision makers are required to make critical decisions throughout all stages of a life-cycle in large-scale projects. These decisions are important as they impact upon the outcome and the success of projects. In this paper we present an evidential reasoning framework to aid decision-makers in the decision making process. This approach utilizes the Dezert-Smarandache Theory (DSm) to fuse heterogeneous evidence sources that suffer from levels of uncertainty, imprecision and conflicts to provide beliefs for decision options. To analyze the impact that source reliability and priority has upon the decision making process a reliability discounting technique along with a priority discounting technique are applied. Application of the evidential reasoning framework is illustrated using a Case Study based in the Aerospace domain.