The combination method for different kinds of beliefs

The evidential reasoning theory provides an important reasoning mechanism, and has been widely researched. However, the researches always focused on the combination for the same kind of beliefs. To solve the combination problems about different kinds of beliefs, this paper proposed a combination method for different kinds of beliefs. This method converts different beliefs to triangular fuzzy numbers or trapezoidal fuzzy numbers, and combines the beliefs by using the computation of fuzzy numbers. The beliefs including number beliefs, interval beliefs, linguistic beliefs and vague beliefs can all be converted to fuzzy numbers. According to the corresponding combination rules, the new method can realize the effective fusion of these different beliefs. The experimental results have proved the feasibility of the new method.