Measuring Conflicts of Multisource Imprecise Information in Multistate System Reliability Assessment

In engineering scenarios, expert judgments play an essential role in reliability assessment, especially for those systems with few historical data. To achieve a rational result, experts from different areas should be involved, and the uncertainties in their assessments should be properly addressed. Such information is often referred to as multisource imprecise information (MSII) and might contain high degree of conflicts, as different experts usually have different expertise and knowledge. Properly quantifying the conflicts among the MSII, then, becomes a critical issue, as the subsequent processing of MSII (e.g., combination and calibration), depends on the degree of conflict in the MSII. To this end, a new conflict measure is put forth based on the Dempster–Shafer theory (DST) to quantify and visualize the conflict in the MSII from a group of experts. In the first place, the MSII from each expert is used to construct the basic belief assignment (BBA) of the reliability estimates for the corresponding expert under the DST. A 2-D conflict measure, which combines the conflict factor and Jousselme distance in DST, is, then, proposed to measure the conflict between the experts’ BBAs. The conflict is quantified from two perspectives, viz., mutual conflict and total conflict. Finally, a Bhattacharyya distance-based method is developed to further quantify the informativeness of each expert's MSII to the system reliability estimate. A numerical example along with an engineering case is used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.