Fusing Multi-Source Information for Reliability Assessment under Uncertainty: An Approach Integrating D-S Evidence Theory with Wiener Process Degradation Modeling
Ying Yan1, Yongqiang Yang2, Cong Jiang3, Bin Suo3, Kai Sun4,*
1 School of Economics and Management, Southwest University of Science and Technology, Mianyang, China
2 Department of Statistics, School of Mathematics, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China
3 School of Information and Control Engineering, Southwest University of Science and Technology, Mianyang, China
4 Institute of Microelectronics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
* Corresponding Author: Kai Sun. Email: 
Computers, Materials & Continua https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2026.084652
Received 27 April 2026; Accepted 04 June 2026; Published online 08 July 2026
Abstract
Degradation data in practical reliability engineering are often scarce and heterogeneous, originating from multiple sources with varying degrees of uncertainty and conflict. Accordingly, this study proposes a hybrid framework that integrates Dempster–Shafer (D-S) evidence theory with the Wiener process for small-sample reliability assessment using multi-source heterogeneous data. First, a probabilistic non-uniform sampling method regularizes varied data sources and computes basic probability assignments (BPA). Second, a weight synthesis mechanism is constructed, where prior weights derived from prior knowledge are updated by evidence similarity quantified through the Expectation–Width (EW) distance, yielding posterior weights. Quantile sequences from each source are then fused via weighted aggregation to generate a time-series probability box. A Wiener process is subsequently employed to model the probability box (P-box) sequence, enabling interval reliability evaluation. Numerical simulations and a satellite gyroscope case study show that the method effectively fuses multi-source data, provides more comprehensive reliability intervals than single-source approaches, and significantly enhances evaluation robustness under small samples. The framework offers a systematic solution for multi-source data fusion and establishes a novel reliability assessment pathway under uncertainty, with broad applicability to aerospace and precision instrumentation systems.
Keywords
Reliability assessment; multi-source data fusion; D-S evidence theory; Wiener process
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