Objective  To ensure accurate comprehensive evaluation of naval ship's maneuvering performance as far as possible, this study proposes an improved evidential reasoning approach.

  Method  The basic concept of the approach is introduced and its evaluation principle and basic process are summarized and analyzed. The approach is then improved in three aspects: first, in order to effectively reflect the matching degree of ship maneuverability and navy demand, the performance matching degree is defined; second, as existing evidential reasoning approaches cannot integrate multi-temporal evaluation data, the concept of credibility is proposed; and third, to address the problem of the large number of qualitative indicators in the evaluation index system, which makes it difficult to guarantee the reliability of single evidence, the reliability of evidence is introduced to weaken the impact of poor data on the evaluation results. On this basis, an example of comprehensive evaluation is calculated and analyzed based on the maneuvering performance data of a certain type of ship. The comprehensive evaluation results are then compared with the evaluation results at each time, and comparisons are made of the evidential reasoning approach with and without considering evidence reliability.

  Result  The comprehensive evaluation results calculated using credibility are the same as the evaluation results two thirds of the time, and credibility follows the principle of minority to majority; and by using evidence reliability correction weighting, the weight of unreliable evidence can be reduced from 20.00% to 13.49%, effectively reducing its impact on the comprehensive evaluation results.

  Conclusion  The results of this study have good reference value for the application of the evidential reasoning approach, and provide a new idea for the comprehensive evaluation of the maneuvering performance of naval vessels.