Evidential Cognitive Maps And Its Application In Socio-economic System Modeling

How to extend the ability of FCM to represent and handle uncertain information is a hot research issue for the past few years. In this paper, a new model named evidential cognitive maps (ECMs), similar to FCM, is proposed with the advantage of evidence theory in representing and dealing with inconsistent information. The detailed highlights are listed as follows:(1) FCM is considered as a soft computing tool, which can not suit the real requirements of researches and applications in the fields of representing uncertain information. After analyzing the limitation of FCM in denoting the uncertain information and concluding new researches about enhancing FCM’s ability of dealing with uncertain information, we enhance FCM’s ability of uncertain information process based on evidence theory to make it represent and handle the uncertain information more flexibly.(2) The intelligence of FCM is partly due to the use of human’s knowledge and experience, so the knowledge of FCM partly derives from human’s experience. However, regarding to the complexity of problems and limitation of experts, experts’ opinions are always inconsistent. How to reach a consensus judgement under the environment of conflict is a significant and meaning issue for the development of FCM. In this paper, efficiently, we combine the relative function of evidence theory to make it be embedded into FCM. At last, the ability of FCM to combine conflict information is extended.