An Approach to Perform Expert Elicitation for Engineering Design Risk Analysis: Methodology and Experimental Results

Abstract

Summary Expert elicitation is increasingly applied to different research areas. Multiple approaches have been implemented, but the development of methods to quantify experts' biases and calibration represents a challenge. As a result, the integration of multiple and often conflicting opinions can be demanding, owing to the complexity of properly weighting experts' contributions. We propose an approach to address this problem when probability densities for seed calibration variables are not available. The methodology generates an expert score that is employed to aggregate multiple-expert assessments. The approach has been experimentally applied to engineering design risk analysis. Results indicate that the approach improves the quality of the estimations. The weighted aggregations of experts' estimates based on the experts' scores achieve better results than the corresponding aggregations based on experts' opinions equally weighted.