The conjunctive combination of interval-valued belief structures from dependent sources

To combine belief functions from reliable dependent sources, Denoeux proposed an operator called the cautious conjunctive rule. In this paper, the conjunctive combination of interval-valued belief structures (IBSs) from reliable dependent sources is investigated. Nonlinear optimization problems based on the cautious rule are constructed and solved to generate an unnormalized and a normalized cautious combination of two IBSs. In a similar manner, optimization problems used to combine multiple IBSs are also constructed. Furthermore, to deal with some situations in which the relative weights of IBSs must be considered, optimization problems considering relative weights are constructed to implement the unnormalized and normalized weighted cautious combination of IBSs. To verify the validity and usefulness of the conjunctive combination of IBSs, a trustworthiness evaluation problem of hospital information systems, which is employed in many hospitals of the Anhui province in China, is solved based on the normalized weighted cautious combination of IBSs.