General Combination Rules for Qualitative and Quantitative Beliefs

Book excerpt: Martin and Osswald have recently proposed many generalizations of combination rules on quantitative beliefs in order to manage the conflict and to consider the specificity of the responses of the experts. Since the experts express themselves usually in natural language with linguistic labels, Smarandache and Dezert have introduced a mathematical framework for dealing directly also with qualitative beliefs. In this paper we recall some element of our previous works and propose the new combination rules, developed for the fusion of both qualitative or quantitative beliefs.