Inland aids to navigation mark the boundaries of navigable waters and play a significant role for ensuring the safe navigation of inland ships. Considering different failure modes of aids to navigation，we propose a status recognition model based on BP-DS evidence theory，use two BP neural networks to train the basic attribute data and environmental factor data，calculate the independent evidence values，and further apply the DS evidence theory to realize the decision-making fusion of aids to navigation operation state recognition results. The results show that the accuracy of status recognition model of aids to navigation based on BP-DS evidence theory is more than 80%，which is higher than the traditional empirical threshold judgment method.