An Introduction to DSmT in Information Fusion

The management and combination of uncertain, imprecise, fuzzy and even paradoxical or highly conflicting sources of information has always been, and still remains today, of primal importance for the development of reliable modern information systems involving artificial reasoning. In this introduction, we present a survey of our recent theory of plausible and para- doxical reasoning, known as Dezert-Smarandache Theory (DSmT), developed for dealing with imprecise, uncertain and conflicting sources of information. We focus our presentation on the foundations of DSmT and on its most important rules of combination, rather than on browsing specific applications of DSmT available in literature. Several simple examples are given throughout this presentation to show the e±ciency and the generality of this new theory.