A new initial population strategy has been developed to improve the genetic algorithm for solving the well-known combinatorial optimization problem, traveling salesman problem. Based on thek-means algorithm, we propose a strategy to restructure the traveling route by reconnecting each cluster. The clusters, which randomly disconnect a link to connect its neighbors, have been ranked in advance according to the distance among cluster centers, so that the initial population can be composed of the random traveling routes. This process isk-means initial population strategy. To test the performance of our strategy, a series of experiments on 14 different TSP examples selected from TSPLIB have been carried out. The results show that KIP can decrease best error value of random initial population strategy and greedy initial population strategy with the ratio of approximately between 29.15% and 37.87%, average error value between 25.16% and 34.39% in the same running time.

Dempster-Shafer evidence theory is widely used in information fusion. However, it may lead to an unreasonable result when dealing with high conflict evidence. In order to solve this problem, we put forward a new method based on the credibility of evidence. First, a novel belief entropy, Deng entropy, is applied to measure the information volume of the evidence and then the discounting coefficients of each evidence are obtained. Finally, weighted averaging the evidence in the system, the Dempster combination rule was used to realize information fusion. A weighted averaging combination role is presented for multi-sensor data fusion in fault diagnosis. It seems more reasonable than before using the new belief function to determine the weight. A numerical example is given to illustrate that the proposed rule is more effective to perform fault diagnosis than classical evidence theory in fusing multi-symptom domains.

How to quantify the uncertain information in the framework of Dempster-Shafer evidence theory is still an open issue. Quite a few uncertainty measures have been proposed in Dempster-Shafer framework, however, the existing studies mainly focus on the mass function itself, the available information represented by the scale of the frame of discernment (FOD) in the body of evidence is ignored. Without taking full advantage of the information in the body of evidence, the existing methods are somehow not that efficient. In this paper, a modified belief entropy is proposed by considering the scale of FOD and the relative scale of a focal element with respect to FOD. Inspired by Deng entropy, the new belief entropy is consistent with Shannon entropy in the sense of probability consistency. What’s more, with less information loss, the new measure can overcome the shortage of some other uncertainty measures. A few numerical examples and a case study are presented to show the efficiency and superiority of the proposed method.

Dempster-Shafer evidence theory (D-S theory) has been widely used in many information fusion systems since it was proposed by Dempster and extended by Shafer. However, how to determine the basic probability assignment (BPA), which is the main and first step in D-S theory, is still an open issue, especially when the given environment is in an open world, which means the frame of discernment is incomplete. In this paper, a method to determine generalized basic probability assignment in an open world is proposed. Frame of discernment in an open world is established first, and then the triangular fuzzy number models to identify target in the proposed frame of discernment are established. Pessimistic strategy based on the differentiation degree between model and sample is defined to yield the BPAs for known targets. If the sum of all the BPAs of known targets is over one, then they will be normalized and the BPA of unknown target is assigned to0; otherwise the BPA of unknown target is equal to1minus the sum of all the known targets BPAs. IRIS classification examples illustrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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