New representation method of evidential conflict

DS evidence theory is widely used in various fields of information fusion due to its efficiency dealing with uncertain information. Unfortunately, combination of these highly conflicting evidences with the classical Dempster's rule leads to produce the counterintuitive results. Many modified combinative rules have been proposed. However, how to represent the conflict between two bodies of evidence is still an open issue. In this paper, a new conflict coefficient is presented. First, the deficiency of the classical conflictive coefficient is analyzed. Then, the distance function between evidences is introduced. A new model to represent conflict is constructed with the distance function and the classical conflictive coefficient. Finally, numerical examples verify the efficiency of the proposed method.