A New Conflict Management in Evidence Theory Based on DEMATEL Method

Abstract

D-S evidence theory is widely used in data fusion. However, the result of Dempster's combination rule is not efficient and in highly conflicting situation. Though the existing methods have been proved efficient to deal with conflict in some applications, the indirect conflict among evidence is neglected to some degree. To solve this problem, a new method is proposed based on decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) and the belief correlation coefficient in this paper. The application in target recognition illustrates the efficiency of the proposed method. Compared with Dempster's rule, averaging method and weighted averaging method, etc., the results obtained by the proposed method have better performance. The main reason is that the indirect conflict is well addressed in the proposed method.