title: Sensor Data Fusion with Z-Numbers and Its Application in Fault Diagnosis.
abstract: Sensor data fusion technology is widely employed in fault diagnosis. The information in a sensor data fusion system is characterized by not only fuzziness, but also partial reliability. Uncertain information of sensors, including randomness, fuzziness, etc., has been extensively studied recently. However, the reliability of a sensor is often overlooked or cannot be analyzed adequately. A Z-number, Z = (A, B), can represent the fuzziness and the reliability of information simultaneously, where the first component A represents a fuzzy restriction on the values of uncertain variables and the second component B is a measure of the reliability of A. In order to model and process the uncertainties in a sensor data fusion system reasonably, in this paper, a novel method combining the Z-number and Dempster-Shafer (D-S) evidence theory is proposed, where the Z-number is used to model the fuzziness and reliability of the sensor data and the D-S evidence theory is used to fuse the uncertain information of Z-numbers. The main advantages of the proposed method are that it provides a more robust measure of reliability to the sensor data, and the complementary information of multi-sensors reduces the uncertainty of the fault recognition, thus enhancing the reliability of fault detection.
authors.affiliation: School of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710072, Shanxi, China. jiangwen@nwpu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Wen
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.affiliation: School of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710072, Shanxi, China. xiechunhe@mail.nwpu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Chunhe
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Xie
authors.affiliation: School of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710072, Shanxi, China. zhuang-my@mail.nwpu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Miaoyan
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Zhuang
authors.affiliation: School of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710072, Shanxi, China. shouyehang@mail.nwpu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Yehang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Shou
authors.affiliation: School of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710072, Shanxi, China. tangyongchuan@mail.nwpu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Yongchuan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Tang
keywords: BPA; Dempster–Shafer evidence theory; Z-number; fault diagnosis; fuzzy; sensor data fusion; uncertainty