Combination of Conflict Evidences Using Grey Association Analysis and D-S Rule

Dempster's rule of combination, a classical combination rule with several interesting mathematical properties, is widely employed. However, as an inherent problem, Dempster's rule of combination is incapable of managing the existing conflicts from various information sources at the process of normalization. The conflict management becomes a crucial problem in the operation of combination, especially in the condition of highly conflicting, which leads to produce the illogical result of combination. In this paper, we introduce the idea of grey association analysis (GAA), and propose a new conflict reassignment approach of belief functions, as a preprocessing method, to automatically identify and reassign the conflicts on belief functions before combination. One numerical example is also employed, and through analysis and comparison of the combined results, in comparison with the existing alternatives, the proposed approach can effectively solve the conflicting problem with the best convergence performance