An information-volume-based distance measure for decision-making

D-S evidence theory, as a general framework for reasoning with uncertainty, allows combining pieces of evidence from different information sources to derive a degree of belief function that is a type of fuzzy measure. However, the mass assignments given by unknown information sources are disordered. How to measure the difference between the mass assignments has aroused people’s interest. In this paper, inspired by the information volume, a novel distance-based measure is proposed to measure the difference between mass assignments. The method can refine the uncertain information given by experts and compare the refined information to obtain the difference between mass assignments. At the same time, it is verified that the measure not only meets the properties of distance, but also proves the superiority of the proposed Information Volume Distance (IVD) through simulation experiments. Meanwhile, in the process of information fusion, the reliability of each source could be quantified through IVD. Therefore, based on IVD, a new multi-source information algorithm is proposed to solve the problem of multi-source information fusion. Moreover, algorithm is applied to decision-making problem and compare with other methods to verify the effectiveness.