Confident Information Coverage Reliability Evaluation for Sensor Networks of Openly Deployed ICP Systems

Industrial Cyber-Physical (ICP) systems are integration of computation and physical processes to help achieve operational excellence. As sensors and actuators compose the openly deployed ICP systems and are often susceptible to interference, it puts forward higher requirements on reliability. Reliable coverage ensures sensors acquiring information and therefore coverage reliability of sensor network is studied from various perspectives. However, most existing reliability evaluation methods ignore the belief degree of coverage which influences the reliability to an extent. To evaluate the coverage reliability from the perspective of belief degree, we firstly define Confident Information Coverage Belief Reliability (CICBR) based on the Confident Information Coverage (CIC) model and D-S evidence theory, which comprehensively considers the coverage rate, interference from the environment, and belief degree of the result. Next, to evaluate the belief degree more reasonably, an Evidence-discount-based basic probability assignment generating method is proposed based on D-S theory to describe the interference in the belief degree. Moreover, a belief evaluation algorithm is proposed to calculate the belief degree of the coverage. Finally, an evidence-Discount-based Confident Information Coverage Belief Reliability Evaluation (D-CICBRE) algorithm is proposed to evaluate CICBR. The simulation result indicates that the proposed method can obtain higher and more reasonable reliability. Therefore, the proposed D-CICBRE algorithm can be used to evaluate the reliability of ICP systems more accurately and reasonably.