Decomposition of conflict as a distribution on hypotheses in the framework on belief functions

• We propose a conflict function defined over the power set of the discernment frame.
• The proposed function helps identifying the origin of conflict.
• The proposed function detects when the conflict is brought by specific hypotheses.
• The proposed function detects when the decision hypothesis is not consensual.
• Applied to vehicle localization, the conflict based fusion outperforms blind fusion.

In this paper, we address the problem of identifying the potential sources of conflict between information sources in the framework of belief function theory. To this aim, we propose a decomposition of the global measure of conflict as a function defined over the power set of the discernment frame. This decomposition, which associates a part of the conflict to some hypotheses, allows identifying the origin of conflict, which is hence considered as “local” to some hypotheses. This is more informative than usual global measures of conflict or disagreement between sources. Having shown the unicity of this decomposition, we illustrate its use on two examples. The first one is a toy example where the fact that conflict is mainly brought by one hypothesis allows identifying its origin. The second example is a real application, namely robot localization, where we show that focusing the conflict measure on the “favored” hypothesis (the one that would be decided) helps us to robustify the fusion process.