A Possibilistic Framework for Sensor Fusion with Monitoring of Sensor Reliability

Sensor and Information fusion is recently a major topic, not only in traffic management, military, avionics, robotics, image processing, and e. g. medical applications, but becomes more and more important in machine diagnosis and conditioning for complex production machines and process engineering. Several approaches for multi-sensor systems exist in the literature, cf. (Hall & Llinas, 2001); (Bossé et al., 2007). The diagnosis and flaw detection in machines and process plants is a complex task, which is dependent on many effects. In the past decades, autonomous and automatic systems have become ubiquitous in our daily life. As famous examples, one may cite advanced driver-assistance systems in vehicles, quality monitoring in production processes, or semi-autonomous unmanned aircraft systems in military forces. All these systems have the common feature that they (partially) capture the state of the environment and generate fused information based on the data gained. More technically, the analogous environment is captured applying several sources (sensors, experts, etc.). After obtaining these analogous signals and experts’ information, they are preprocessed and transformed into the digital domain, so that they can be processed on computers. In many cases the information captured from the environment may be imprecise, incomplete or inconsistent. Furthermore, signal sources may be not reliable. Therefore, it is necessary to extend known fusion concepts insofar that they are able to handle and to measure imprecision and reliability. In this chapter we will highlight, to our best knowledge, a new human-centric based fusion framework. Additionally, an application of the fusion method is shown for printing machines in the area of quality inspection and machine conditioning. The goal is the early recognition of errors in machines in order to avoid flaws by combining measuring data from several sensors with expert knowledge for the improvement of quality by