Review of Uncertainty Reasoning Approaches as Guidance for Maritime and Offshore Safety-Based Assessment

Many different formal techniques have been developed over the past two decades for dealing with uncertain information for decision making. In this paper we review some of the most important ones, i.e., Bayesian theory of probability, Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence, and fuzzy set theory, describe how they work and in what ways they differ from one another, and show their strength and weakness respectively as well as their connection. We also consider hybrid approaches which combine two or more approximate reasoning techniques within a single reasoning framework. These have been proposed to address limitations in the use of individual techniques. The study is intended to provide guidance in the process of developing frameworks for maritime and offshore safety-based decision analysis using different methods for reasoning under uncertainty.