Improved Evidence Fusion Theory for the Safety Assessment of Prestressed Concrete Bridges

The safety condition assessment of prestressed concrete bridges is currently subject to great uncertainty due to the subjectivity of data collection and data types. This study proposes an improved evidence fusion method, improving the conventional Dempster–Shafer fusion method to reduce assessment inaccuracies caused by data uncertainty. Firstly, the uncertain analytic hierarchy process was applied to construct a three-level safety assessment model for 15 different indicators with their initial weights. Secondly, the fuzzy matter element theory was proposed to obtain basic probability assignments required for the evidence fusion. Finally, an improved evidence fusion method was proposed based on the evidence credibility and preprocessing corrections for highly conflicting evidence. In this study, a prestressed concrete bridge in eastern China was used as a case study to perform a comprehensive safety assessment and verify the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed method. The assessment results demonstrate that the improved fusion method in this study can deal with conflicting evidence better than existing fusion methods. Compared with conventional fuzzy AHP method, it has greater sensitivity to certain indicators with severe damages, which prevents those indicators from being overshadowed by other well-performing ones in the overall assessment.

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