This proposal offers a program of research that will lead to the design and demonstration of a method for improved rapid decision making. Our method makes use of judgmental inputs from diverse experts who might be widely separated geographically and attitudinally. It accepts the judgmental inputs in structure form and in natural language, synthesizes the judgments, generates and ranks alternative approaches to the solution of tactical or strategic problems, highlights risks and uncertainties, allows focus on areas of disagreement among the experts, and scores the decisions on the basis of precisely stated criteria. This proposal requires application of the science of decision theory, as well as the application of advanced software. We will bring to bear two areas of decision theory: decision modeling, a technique for identifying an alternative which best satisfies previously stated optimization criteria and Delphi, a technique for collecting expert judgments
