Weapon system operational effectiveness evaluation based on the belief rule-based system with interval data

Weapon system operational effectiveness evaluation is of significant importance to weapon system development, and it can be viewed as a multiple criteria decision-making problem with qualitative information, precise data, interval data, and even missing information. Furthermore, due to the complexity of weapon systems and military operations, using prior knowledge such as experiment data, simulation data, and experts' knowledge could enhance the accuracy and reliability of the evaluation result. To this end, by introducing interval-valued evidential reasoning (ER) approach into belief rule-based system (BRBS), this paper proposed an interval-valued BRB inference method for weapon system operational effectiveness evaluation Firstly, the operational effectiveness evaluation hierarchy is established based on the analysis of the weapon system. Then, the belief rule base (BRB) is constructed to capture prior knowledge of the weapon system. Next, different kinds of information are transformed into belief distribution, and the proposed interval-valued BRB inference method is applied to relay the input to the BRB and obtain the evaluation result. Finally, three numerical examples of missile system operational effectiveness evaluation with interval data, precise data, and missing information are conducted to illustrate the process of the proposed method and demonstrate its feasibility.