Are Alternatives to Dempster’s Rule of Combination Alternatives?

In the latest issue of this journal, Lefevre et al.’s paper [1] raises the important question of how to combine belief functions from different sources and how to manage conflicts. They propose a parametrized combination rule that includes several existing combination rules as special cases. Their method is based on so-called weighting factors that determine how conflicting masses are to be distributed among the subsets of the corresponding frames of discernment. Since my understanding of Dempster-Shafer theory and my practical experience with belief function modelisation and corresponding computations is quite different, I do not support several points in their approach.