Aggregating Information Toward Military Decision Making

Abstract

The problem of aggregating multiple opinions from multiple individuals presents a decision making challenge. Within the realm of military intelligence analyst decision support, this work considers the matter of aggregating information by first starting with the task of ranking multiple independent judgments from multiple independent individuals. The overarching goal of this research campaign is to investigate the use of heuristic and probabilistic aggregation models with respect to the Value of Information (VoI) problem domain. This paper presents discussion about ongoing VoI research and an exploratory experiment using the Borda count model. The results from the experiment demonstrate the efficacy of the Borda method in aggregating people’s opinions and clearly highlight the “wisdom of the crowd” effect. Future research directions are also offered.