Exploring the Combination Rules of D Numbers From a Perspective of Conflict Redistribution
This work addresses a key unsolved issue in uncertainty modeling for researchers in evidence theory, though it appears incremental as it builds directly on existing D numbers.
The paper tackles the problem of combining D numbers, a novel uncertainty model, by proposing two combination rules based on conflict redistribution, which can reduce to Dempster's rule under certain conditions.
Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence is widely applied to uncertainty modelling and knowledge reasoning because of its advantages in dealing with uncertain information. But some conditions or requirements, such as exclusiveness hypothesis and completeness constraint, limit the development and application of that theory to a large extend. To overcome the shortcomings and enhance its capability of representing the uncertainty, a novel model, called D numbers, has been proposed recently. However, many key issues, for example how to implement the combination of D numbers, remain unsolved. In the paper, we have explored the combination of D Numbers from a perspective of conflict redistribution, and proposed two combination rules being suitable for different situations for the fusion of two D numbers. The proposed combination rules can reduce to the classical Dempster's rule in Dempster-Shafer theory under a certain conditions. Numerical examples and discussion about the proposed rules are also given in the paper.