General Algorithms for Barnett s Structure in Evidential Reasoning

A major problem encountered when applications of the Dempster-Shafer ev-idence handling methods are contemplated is the computational complekity of the basic operations. Barnett has proposed a linear-time computational tech-nique for use in evidential reasoning. However, it is restricted to the entire orthogonal sum of dichotomous evidential functions. This means that there has to be a piece of evidence for each contender for the choice being made. This paper presents more general algorithms for combining d…