An intelligent hierarchical decision architecture for operational test and evaluation

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.