Machine conditioning by importance controlled information fusion

Sensor and information fusion is recently a major topic which becomes important in machine diagnosis and conditioning for complex production machines and process engineering. It is a known fact that distributed automation systems have a major impact on signal processing and pattern recognition for machine diagnosis. Therefore, it is necessary to research and develop smart diagnosis methods which are applicable for distributed systems like resource-limited cyber-physical systems. In this paper we propose an new approach for sensor and information fusion based on Evidence Theory and socio-psychological decision-making. We show that context based condition monitoring is instantiated even in conflict situations, oc-curing in real life scenarios permanently. A simple but effective importance measure is proposed which controls the significance of conditioning propositions in a system.