A Redundancy Metric Set within Possibility Theory for Multi-Sensor Systems

Abstract

In intelligent technical multi-sensor systems, information is often at least partly redundant—either by design or inherently due to the dynamic processes of the observed system. If sensors are known to be redundant, (i) information processing can be engineered to be more robust against sensor failures, (ii) failures themselves can be detected more easily, and (iii) computational costs can be reduced. This contribution proposes a metric which quantifies the degree of redundancy between sensors. It is set within the possibility theory. Information coming from sensors in technical and cyber–physical systems are often imprecise, incomplete, biased, or affected by noise. Relations between information of sensors are often only spurious. In short, sensors are not fully reliable. The proposed metric adopts the ability of possibility theory to model incompleteness and imprecision exceptionally well. The focus is on avoiding the detection of spurious redundancy. This article defines redundancy in the context of possibilistic information, specifies requirements towards a redundancy metric, details the information processing, and evaluates the metric qualitatively on information coming from three technical datasets.