A new conflict management method in Dempster–Shafer theory

Conflict management is a hot research topic in Dempster–Shafer theory which is used to avoid the counterintuition problem of combination results. In the present conflict management methods, conflicting evidence is assigned to smaller weight to reduce its influence on the combination result. However, these methods will be disabled when similarity collision occurs. In this article, a new conflict management method based on similarity and Basic Probability Assignment-Matrix is proposed; in the proposed method, similarity collision is diminished by computing the index of each element in evidence, and then, a more reasonable evidence weight can be determined in this way. In the end, two experiments are set to compare the results of several different methods, and the results illustrate that the conflicting evidence will be assigned to a smaller weight in our method than in others.