Evidential calibration process of multi-agent based system: An application to forensic entomology

Forensic entomology consists, during a criminal investigation, in studying the insects found on a cadaver to estimate the time of death. This is the only technique that can be used for a large post-mortem interval. But, because of the important system complexity, the result given by the expert are imperfect. In this paper, a decision support system (DSS) has been developed to take into account all the ecosystemic parameters and a significant quantity of biological models. The proposed DSS is based on the belief function theory to validate and calibrate agent based simulations. First results of this architecture are presented within the framework of a real forensic examination. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.