A novel evidence combination rule based on compromise conflict indicator and conflict focal element

Abstract

The Dempster–Shafer evidence theory (DSET) has been commonly used in the fusion of multisource information in various fields. Owing to the normalization process based on the conflict measurement, the conclusion when fusing high conflict evidence is counter-intuitive when using Dempster’s Combination Rule (DCR). To solve the DCR issue, several combination rules have been developed. However, each of them has unreasonable behaviors in certain cases. In this study, the set of mathematical properties that must be satisfied by all the combinatorial rules is further refined. Under the framework of DSET, a novel combination rule is proposed by comprehensively considering the conflict focal elements and metrics. The conflict measurement is achieved through the newly proposed compromise conflict indicator. The advantages of the proposed combination rule over the existing methods are demonstrated by experiments on a few numerical examples and applications.