An improved method of D-S evidence reasoning

In this paper, conventional D-S evidence theory (DST) is improved to address the problem of counter-intuitive behaviour in the application of D-S evidence theory. Firstly, the Dempster's rule of combination is extended to the general cases based on Xu Ling-yu's combination rule. Secondly, since all evidence resources are assumed fully reliable in evidence theory, which is difficult to be satisfied for real applications, the reliability of evidence sources are introduced in evidence fusion process to manage unreliable evidences. Numerical examples indicate that the improved method can resolve the counter-intuitive problems of DST and can improve the reliability of fusion results efficiently.