A New Method to Handle Conflict when Combining Evidences Using Entropy Function and Evidence Angle with an Effective Application in Fault Diagnosis

Abstract

Addressing the problem of fusing highly conflicting evidences in Dempster–Shafer theory is one of the most necessary, important, and difficult research directions all the time, and so far we have published two papers related to it. In this paper, another novel method to handle conflict when combining evidences is proposed, where evidence distance, evidence angle, and improved entropy function, three key tools, are used for constructing the final weight of each body of evidence. This newly proposed approach mainly consists of three steps: firstly, both evidence distance and evidence angle determine the initial weight together; secondly, making use of the improved entropy modifies the initial weight to get the final weight; lastly, the classical D-S combination rule will be applied to obtain final fusion results. Still a classical numeric example and a real fault diagnosis application both demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency, and compared with other current popular methods including two of our previous works, this new approach can converge fast and reduce most uncertainty of decision-making when fusing highly conflicting evidences.