Multisensor Data Fusion in IoT Environments in Dempster-Shafer Theory Setting: An Improved Evidence Distance-Based Approach

In IoT environments, voluminous amounts of data are produced every single second. Due to multiple factors, these data are prone to various imperfections, they could be uncertain, conflicting, or even incorrect leading to wrong decisions. Multisensor data fusion has proved to be powerful for managing data coming from heterogeneous sources and moving towards effective decision-making. Dempster-Shafer (D-S) theory is a robust and flexible mathematical tool for modeling and merging uncertain, imprecise, and incomplete data, and is widely used in multisensor data fusion applications such as decision-making, fault diagnosis, pattern recognition, etc. However, the combination of contradictory data has always been challenging in D-S theory, unreasonable results may arise when dealing with highly conflicting sources. In this paper, an improved evidence combination approach is proposed to represent and manage both conflict and uncertainty in IoT environments in order to improve decision-making accuracy. It mainly relies on an improved evidence distance based on Hellinger distance and Deng entropy. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, a benchmark example for target recognition and two real application cases in fault diagnosis and IoT decision-making have been provided. Fusion results were compared with several similar methods, and simulation analyses have shown the superiority of the proposed method in terms of conflict management, convergence speed, fusion results reliability, and decision accuracy. In fact, our approach achieved remarkable accuracy rates of 99.32% in target recognition example, 96.14% in fault diagnosis problem, and 99.54% in IoT decision-making application.

A new method of conflicting evidence management based on non-extensive entropy and Lance distance in uncertain scenarios

Handing uncertain information is one of the research focuses currently. For the sake of great ability of handing uncertain information, Dempster-Shafer evidence theory (D-S theory) has been widely used in various fields of uncertain information processing. However, when highly contradictory evidence appears, the results of the classical Dempster combination rules (DCR) can be counterintuitive. Aiming at this defect, by considering the relationship between the evidence and its own characteristics, the proposed method is a new method of conflicting evidence management based on non-extensive entropy and Lance distance in uncertain scenarios. Firstly, the Lance distance function is used to measure the degree of discrepancy and conflict between evidences, and the credibility of evidence is expressed by matrix. Introducing non-extensive entropy to measure the amount of information about evidence and express the uncertainty of evidence. Secondly, the discount coefficient of the final fusion evidence is measured by considering the credibility and uncertainty of the evidence, and the original evidence is modified by the discount coefficient. Then, the final result is obtained by evidence fusion with DCR. Finally, two numerical examples are provided to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method, and the utility of our work is demonstrated through an application of the active lane change to avoid obstacles to the autonomous driving of new energy vehicles. The proposed method has a better identification accuracy, reaching 0.9811.

A New Total Uncertainty Measure from A Perspective of Maximum Entropy Requirement

The Dempster-Shafer theory (DST) is an information fusion framework and widely used in many fields. However, the uncertainty measure of a basic probability assignment (BPA) is still an open issue in DST. There are many methods to quantify the uncertainty of BPAs. However, the existing methods have some limitations. In this paper, a new total uncertainty measure from a perspective of maximum entropy requirement is proposed. The proposed method can measure both dissonance and non-specificity in BPA, which includes two components. The first component is consistent with Yager's dissonance measure. The second component is the non-specificity measurement with different functions. We also prove the desirable properties of the proposed method. Besides, numerical examples and applications are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed total uncertainty measure.