Development of a procedure for expert estimation of capabilities in defense planning under multicriterial conditions

Abstract

Improving the decision-making efficiency in defense planning based on the capabilities of military forces and means for performing purposeful tasks requires new methodological approaches and their implementation in the form of software information-analytical tools. Given the complex information environment of defense planning, it is appropriate for the variants of capabilities development options to be chosen by experts on the methodological basis of multicriterial analysis. The research result is the development of a procedure, in which it is proposed to generate criteria and evaluate alternative options by integrating ontology, the Analytical Hierarchy Process, and the method of directed graphs. The ontological representation of the data ensures the construction of the hierarchical taxonomy of a domain and the formation of the criteria vector. The Analytical Hierarchy Process is used to conduct an expert evaluation of capabilities by their pairwise comparison against determined criteria. Experts' judgments are visualized and controlled using directed graphs. Application of the procedure will make it possible to ensure efficiency, versatility, and simplicity of technical implementation of a procedure of decision making support. The procedure was tested on the example of choosing a capability to conduct reconnaissance for the benefit of ground artillery. It was shown that the evaluation process in the expert activity is considerably simplified due to the graph visualization. The proposed procedure introduces an innovative tool to achieve strategic goals and accomplish the basic tasks of the defense reform, which is relevant for many countries. The versatility of the procedure creates the basis for its application not only in defense but also in other force departments

Devising a procedure for justifying the choice of reconnaissance-firing systems

“…A pairwise comparison of the selected for the example of RVS is performed for each of the criteria. The comparison is performed in accordance with the values for a variant of the scale by T. Saaty [19] (Table 1). Much better/much more important/has a significant advantage 5…”

“…Next, we determined the assessment of the component of the eigenvector from the known formula for finding the average geometric value [16,17,[19][20][21][22]:…”

“…where W is the ratio of consistency; r is the consistency index for a symmetric matrix; for matrix 4×4, this index is 0.9 [16,17,[19][20][21][22]. Next, we determine the global priorities of RFS relative to each of the selection criteria by entering the values of the normalized assessments of the vectors of priorities for RFS in relation to each of the criteria and the normalized assessments of the vectors of the criteria priorities into the table.…”

“…The results of analyzing previous studies [19] indicate that the specified methods are quite popular among researchers and are used in various fields of science.…”

“…Thus, the Analytic Hierarchy Process method and an expert evaluation method were applied in study [19]. Based on these methods, the cited study devised a procedure for improving the effectiveness of solving the multicriterial problem of capacity assessment in defense planning.…”