Enhancing cognitive plausibility of uncertainty calculus: a common-sense-based approach to propagation and aggregation

Uncertainty calculus overcomes many of the drawbacks affecting other well-known approaches to uncertain reasoning. Nevertheless, it suffers from other severe limitations and gives rise to counter-intuitive results. We show that common sense inconsistencies of uncertainty calculus originate from a scarce cognitive plausibility in the definition of propagation and aggregation operators, and we propose an improved version of Driankov´s uncertainty calculus (1986) where the definition of such operators is substantially revised according to common sense criteria. Revised uncertainty calculus allows overcoming in a general and uniform way all the problems identified in uncertainty calculus and provides a substantial enhancement of cognitive plausibility. It has been successfully tested in the design and development of a real application concerning preventive diagnosis of power transformers