Publications
Applications of evidence theory to issues with nuclear weapons
Over the last 13 years, at Sandia National Laboratories we have applied the belief/plausibility measure from evidence theory to estimate the uncertainty for numerous safety and security issues for nuclear weapons. For such issues we have significant epistemic uncertainty and are unable to assign probability distributions. We have developed and applied custom software to implement the belief/plausibility measure of uncertainty. For safety issues we perform a quantitative evaluation, and for security issues (e.g., terrorist acts) we use linguistic variables (fuzzy sets) combined with approximate reasoning. We perform the following steps: Train Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) on assignment of evidence Work with SMEs to identify the concern(s): the top-level variable(s) Work with SMEs to identify lower-level variable and functional relationship(s) to the top-level variable(s) Then the SMEs gather their State of Knowledge (SOK) and assign evidence to the lower-level variables. Using this information, we evaluate the variables using custom software and produce an estimate for the top-level variable(s) including uncertainty. We have extended the Kaplan-Garrick risk triplet approach for risk to use the belief/plausibility measure of uncertainty.