The modeling of epistemic knowledge is a necessity of most systems dealing with some sort of artificial reasoning. There a re several formalisms able to mathematically model someone’s degrees of belief. A very popular one is the Bayesian Theory, which is based on a prior knowledge of a probability distribution. Another model is the Theory of Evidence, or DempskrShafer Theory, which provides a m...

The origins of Dempster-Shafer theory (DST) go back to the work by Dempster (1967) who developed a system of upper and lower probabilities. Following this, his student Shafer (1976), in his book “A Mathematical Theory of Evidence” added to Dempster’s work, including a more thorough explanation of belief functions. In summary, it is a methodology for evidential reasoning, manipulating uncertaint...

This paper deals with the use of Bayesian networks to compute system reliability. The reliability analysis problem is described and the usual methods for quantitative reliability analysis are presented within a case study. Some drawbacks that justify the use of Bayesian networks are identified. The basic concepts of the Bayesian networks application to reliability analysis are introduced and a ...

Landslide databases and input parameters used for modeling landslide hazard often contain imprecisions and uncertainties inherent in the decision-making process. Dealing with imprecision and uncertainty requires techniques that go beyond classical logic. In this paper, methods of fuzzy k -means classification were used to assign digital terrain attributes to continuous landform classes whereas ...

This paper presents UOWD-Sharif team’s approach for XML information retrieval. This approach is an extension of PLIR which is an experimental knowledge-based information retrieval system. This system like PLIR utilizes plausible inferences to first infer the relevance of sentences in XML documents and then propagates the relevance to the other textual units in the document tree. Two approaches ...

This study presents a framework for calculating the risk of various projects, especially projects under uncertain circumstances. First, the related literature is reviewed and then the relationship between risk and projects is examined. Using a case study an approach is provided to determine the project risk in uncertain circumstances where sufficient data is not available for decision-making. I...

The majority of existing automatic mine detection algorithms which have been developed are robust at detecting mine-like objects (MLOs) at the expense of detecting many false alarms. These objects must later be classified as mine or not-mine. The authors present a model based technique using Dempster–Shafer information theory to extend the standard mine/not-mine classification procedure to prov...

This paper presents an original method for evaluating reliability indices for Multi-State Systems (MSSs) in the presence of aleatory and epistemic uncertainties. In many real world MSSs an insufficiency of data makes it difficult to estimate precise values for component state probabilities. The proposed approach applies the Transferable Belief Model (TBM) interpretation of the Dempster-Shafer t...