Method for evaluating the risk of selecting types of agricultural machinery based on evidence theory

Agricultural machinery type selecting is the one of the key steps of farm machine purchase subsidy object, which has characteristics of complexity, uncertainty and imprecise. The evidence theory was applied to risk evaluation of agricultural machinery type selecting and an evaluation method for the risk evaluation was proposed. In this paper, some primary factors of risks and their sources were analyzed and risk sequels were established by considering the risks of demand, ability, technique, corporation, product capability, and decision support system of bidding evaluation. The basic probability assignment functions and the belief functions were determined according to the evidences collected through requiring surveys and the concepts and decision-making procedures based on the evidence theory. The Dumpster rule was adopted to integrate those evidences. Performance function was constructed and the risks of agricultural machinery type selecting can be compared. The case analysis shows that the evidence reasoning method is efficient and practical for risk evaluation of agricultural machinery type selecting.