An Introduction to the DSm Theory for the Combination of Paradoxical, Uncertain, and Imprecise Sources of Information

摘要

The management and combination of uncertain, imprecise, fuzzy and evenparadoxical or high conflicting sources of information has always been, andstill remains today, of primal importance for the development of reliablemodern information systems involving artificial reasoning. In thisintroduction, we present a survey of our recent theory of plausible andparadoxical reasoning, known as Dezert-Smarandache Theory (DSmT) in theliterature, developed for dealing with imprecise, uncertain and paradoxicalsources of information. We focus our presentation here rather on thefoundations of DSmT, and on the two important new rules of combination, than onbrowsing specific applications of DSmT available in literature. Several simpleexamples are given throughout the presentation to show the efficiency and thegenerality of this new approach.