A Modified Approach to Conflict Management From the Perspective of Non-Conflicting Element Set

In Dempster-Shafer (D-S) evidence theory, how to deal with conflict is an important and open topic. Two key strategies for resolving conflicts of evidence are considered, namely information averaging and information focus. How to balance this relationship is still a question worth considering. Recently, Ma et al. studied evidence conflicts from the perspective of complete conflict set and proposed a flexible rule for conflict evidence combination. The proposed combination rule seems to take into account the above two strategies. However, through analysis, we find that Ma et al.’s method tends to use the average method to solve conflicting propositions, while Dempster’s combined rule has a weak focusing function. In this paper, based on the concept of non-conflict element set, a new conflict handling method is proposed. First, the similarity between the evidences is characterized by the correlation coefficient; based on this, a new weighting scheme of evidence is developed. In addition, the propositional support is reasonably allocated through discounts.Through numerical examples, the applicability and superiority of the method are compared and analyzed. The results show that the proposed method takes two strategies of averaging and focusing into consideration, and the information variance is small.