Decision Support System for Research & Development Investment Strategy

The objective is to develop an expert system to serve as a decision aid to support resource allocation decision making in the Air Force Human Systems Center research and development community. This decision aid will incorporate the best methods for categorizing, prioritizing, and allocating resources to the most promising projects. Previous methodologies for program planning have tended to be narrowly focused along technical disciplines, not integrative across disciplies. We propose to combine ideas from the fields of R&D management, decision analysis, expert systems, fuzzy logic, and polynomial network modeling into a unified methodology. In Phase I, we propose to: (1) review the current status of cost/benefit analysis and the assessment of the utility/worth; (2) develop measures of benefit for human-centered research, (3) develop and apply a resource allocation methodology, and (4) develop an initial implementation of the methodology on a microcomputer system. In Phase II, the computerized implementation will be developed fully. The Phase II development will permit R&D managers to allocate resources across many different projects and estimate the comparable worth of each effort.