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A cost estimate for a project such as the acquisition of a new aircraft or satellite system carries with it an inherent probability that the actual cost will exceed the estimate-that changes in requirements, technology, the economic environment, and a multitude of other factors that may occur over the life of the project will change the final cost. One major approach to cost risk analysis-the evaluating and quantifying of the uncertainty of a cost estimate-has been probabilistic: expressing the uncertainty in a cost estimate as a probability distribution over a range of potential costs. Cost analysts in industry and government and researchers in statistics and management have often proposed that, to get probability distributions for platforms using new and untried technologies, expert judgment should be tapped and subjective probability distributions elicited from the experts to represent cost uncertainty. This technical report reviews procedures for eliciting subjective probability distributions in cost risk analysis, both in the cost risk field and in other disciplines in which elicitation has been a topic of research-primarily, statistics and psychology. Because of a lack of empirical work in elicitation, especially in cost risk, the author also interviewed a number of senior people in the cost risk community, who gave insight into the practices of the field. This report should be of interest to cost analysis professionals who wish to quantify uncertainty when using expert opinions in cost risk analysis.

United States. --- Appropriations and expenditures. --- Costs. --- Cost control.

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Nearly all Air Force electronics are tested and repaired using automatic test systems, each of which consists of a set of automated test equipment and a suite of software designed to test and facilitate repair of specific units. Most of these testers were designed and built for specific weapon systems, many of which are ageing. These test systems are beset by increasing hardware and software obsolescence, which is compounded by the number and variety of legacy tester types. Moreover, current Department of Defense policy is to use families of common test systems. The Air Force is thus planning to modernize its component repair capabilities accordingly. This report focuses on the economic aspect of the rehosting decision, i.e., which component repairs should be rehosted to use resources most efficiently while maintaining repair capabilities. The authors developed a methodology for formulating rehosting decisions for each legacy tester for each associated unit under test. They found rewriting software to run on the new systems to be the major cost driver. In some situations, an incremental rehosting strategy may be justified. In other cases, an entire workload may need to be rehosted because so few testers of a particular type are available. Finally, the long-term benefits of modern, common testing equipment make a strong case for making common families be the foundation of automatic test system acquisition for future platforms.

Weapons systems --- Testing. --- United States. --- Weapons systems --- Testing.

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To ease the burden of deploying large amounts of aircraft, personnel, and equipment to theatres of operation in times of crisis, the Air Force has reorganized into an Expeditionary Aerospace Force. This work covers a way for defining the structure to speed deployment to forward operating locations.

Airlift, Military --- Deployment (Strategy). --- United States. --- United States. --- Supplies and stores. --- Reorganization. --- Expeditionary Aerospace Force

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Many new Army initiatives such as Velocity Management and Force XXI are based on the assumption that information will be a key asset for U.S. armed forces of the future. Many Army logistics data, however, are widely perceived to be of poor quality. In this report, the authors review the current literature on data quality, develop a three-way scheme for classifying data quality problems, and apply the classification to the analysis of an important logistics data element, the End Item Code (EIC). The authors argue that the EIC has quality problems of all three types, and review the evidence and efforts of the Army to address each. The most fundamental problem is due to the deep gap between the retail organizations that create EIC data and the wholesale organizations that use it. The authors propose several strategies to bridge the gap in order to improve the quality of the EIC data. An appendix applies the data classification scheme to a number of other important logistics data elements exhibiting data-quality problems and reaches similar conclusions about their causes.

Logistics --- Information storage and retrieval systems --- Quality control. --- United States. --- Supplies and stores. --- Equipment.

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This is an assessment of the manner in which the Jet Engine Intermediate Maintenance (JEIM) shops of the United States Air Force can best be configured to support Expeditionary Aerospace Forces both in peacetime and in war.

Jet engines --- Maintenance and repair. --- United States. --- Facilities. --- Ground support. --- Reorganization.