Developing a monitoring system for long-distance pipeline leakage incorporating fusion of conflicting evidences

Abstract

Quite often, during long-distance pipe leakage, critical decisions have to be made quickly and with as much certainty as possible using conflicting and uncertain sources of information. Key to providing quality decision options is an appropriate method of combining, or fusing, these heterogeneous evidence sources. Since the development of belief function theory introduced by Shafer in the 1970s many combination rules have been proposed in the literature because in highly conflicting situations the emblematic Dempster's rule generates counter-intuitive and unacceptable results in practical applications. In this work, the Dezert-Smarandache theory (DSmT) will be explored, in particular the PCR5 and PCR6 rules of proportional conflict redistribution, and a simple long-distance pipe leakage monitoring method is developed to help in the development of a method for more complicated situations.