Exploring the Combination Rules of D Numbers From a Perspective of
  Conflict Redistribution
  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.
