A decision aid for selecting among alternative research and development investments

In periods of declining budgets, it becomes increasingly important to select the best possible research and development programs to invest in, and then to be able to articulate the rationale for the selection. Competing alternative investments will have a complex tradeoff of costs and diverse benefits, over different time periods and with different levels of certainty. In particular, the Air Force Research Laboratory needs to select which investments to pursue to improve fixed-wing vehicle performance. Multi-objective decision analysis is applied to this problem to produce a decision aid that captures their corporate objectives and allows full analysis of the tradeoffs between alternatives. The decision aid is described in detail and a brief example of its use is presented.