Multi-source data fusion method for structural safety assessment of water diversion structures

Abstract Building safety assessment based on single sensor data has the problems of low reliability and high uncertainty. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel multi-source sensor data fusion method based on Improved Dempster–Shafer (D-S) evidence theory and Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN). Before data fusion, the improved self-support function is adopted to preprocess the original data. The process of data fusion is divided into three steps: Firstly, the feature of the same kind of sensor data is extracted by the adaptive weighted average method as the input source of BPNN. Then, BPNN is trained and its output is used as the basic probability assignment (BPA) of D-S evidence theory. Finally, Bhattacharyya Distance (BD) is introduced to improve D-S evidence theory from two aspects of evidence distance and conflict factors, and multi-source data fusion is realized by D-S synthesis rules. In practical application, a three-level information fusion framework of the data level, the feature level, and the decision level is proposed, and the safety status of buildings is evaluated by using multi-source sensor data. The results show that compared with the fusion result of the traditional D-S evidence theory, the algorithm improves the accuracy of the overall safety state assessment of the building and reduces the MSE from 0.18 to 0.01%.