A novel method of evidential network reasoning based on the logical reasoning rules and conflict measure

Evidential reasoning satisfies a weaker condition than probability theory and can deal with uncertain scenarios. However, there is still no complete and consistent theoretical system in the evidential reasoning now. In this paper, a novel method of evidential network reasoning based on the logical reasoning rules and conflict measure is proposed. The state of nodes is described through several basic probability assignments(BPAs). Two logical reasoning rules are defined to show that the occurrence of some antecedents in the parent nodes will lead to the sub-BPAs of the child node occurrence. Then the occurrence probability of sub-BPA with the child node is computed through antecedent probabilities in the parent nodes. Besides, the support degree of sub-BPAs is computed based on the evidential distance. The final BPA of the child node is obtained by combining weighted sub-BPAs. Two examples about fault diagnosis and threat assessment and prediction are given respectively to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Different from the previous work, this paper defines a new reasoning rule called OR rule, and the computation based on pure logic makes the reasoning process more intuitive. Besides, the weights of sub-BPAs are computed considering both the occurrence probability and conflict measure.