Presentation of DSmT

This chapter presents a general overview and foundations of the DSmT, i.e. the recent theory of plausible and paradoxical reasoning developed by the authors, specially for the static or dynamic fusion of information arising from several independent but potentially highly conflicting, uncertain and imprecise sources of evidence. We introduce and justify here the basis of the DSmT framework with respect to the Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST), a mathematical theory of evidence developed in 1976 by Glenn Shafer. We present the DSm combination rules and provide some simple illustrative examples and comparisons with other main rules of combination available in the literature for the combination of information for simple fusion problems. Detailed presentations on recent advances and applications of DSmT are presented in the next chapters of this book. 1.