Summary
Considering the effect of many factors on structural behavior, the diagnosing problem on structural behavior of dam engineering is investigated. Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence (DST) and set pair theory (SPT) are combined to fuse the multisource space–time information on dam safety. The structural behavior of dam engineering is identified and its development is forecasted by implementing the information fusions with 3 levels, namely, data fusion, feature fusion, and decision fusion. First, a multisource information fusion system on dam safety is built and an information fusion‐based flowchart is presented to diagnose the dam structural behavior. Second, the batch estimation algorithm is adopted to implement the data fusion on same type information. Third, DST and SPT are applied to the decision fusion on heterogeneous information of dam safety. The index connection number and partial connection number in SPT are introduced to determine the basic probability assignment in DST and identify the dam structural behavior, respectively. Last, one actual dam undergoing structural reinforcements is taken as an example. Its structural behavior is diagnosed, and the reinforcement effect is assessed. It is indicated that the proposed approach is more suitable to be used to evaluate the safety status and reinforcement effect of dangerous dam.