Intelligent multicriteria decision support system for systems design

It is challenging to assess new technology in complex, interdisciplinary integrated systems, such as air transportation systems. Conflicting disciplines and technologies are always involved in aerospace systems design processes. Multicriteria Decision Analysis techniques can help decision makers to effectively deal with such situations and make wise design decisions. There is a variety of existing methods; thus, selection of the most appropriate method is critical because the use of inappropriate methods is often the cause of misleading design decisions. In this paper, an appropriateness index is used to quantify the goodness of a method for solving the problem under consideration. This method selection approach is implemented and an intelligent knowledge-based system is developed consisting of a multicriteria decision analysis library storing widely used decision analysis methods and a knowledge base providing the information required for the method selection process. Furthermore, a new approach for uncertainty assessment in the decision analysis process is proposed in this study. This novel approach for uncertainty assessment can be used to aggregate input data from tools with different fidelity levels and is capable of propagating uncertainties in an assessment chain. A business aircraft evaluation problem is conducted as a proof of implementation.