Evidence conflict measure based on OWA operator in open world

Abstract

Dempster-Shafer evidence theory has been extensively used in many information fusion systems since it was proposed by Dempster and extended by Shafer. Many scholars have been conducted on conflict management of Dempster-Shafer evidence theory in past decades. However, how to determine a potent parameter to measure evidence conflict, when the given environment is in an open world, namely the frame of discernment is incomplete, is still an open issue. In this paper, a new method which combines generalized conflict coefficient, generalized evidence distance, and generalized interval correlation coefficient based on ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator, to measure the conflict of evidence is presented. Through ordered weighted average of these three parameters, the combinatorial coefficient can still measure the conflict effectively when one or two parameters are not valid. Several numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.