The first work introducing relations between rough set theory and Dempster - Shafer theory, through - then new - ideas of qualities of lower and upper approximations of a set, was an unpublished paper from 1987, circulated among rough set community, entitled Rough - set and Dempster - Shafer approaches to knowledge acquisition under uncertainty - a comparison and authored by Jerzy W. Grzymala-Busse.
The ideas were first implemented by Hang Cheng in 1992 in a system that was able to compute, among others, belief and plausibility for a given input table and create an input table for a given basic probability assignment. The system was then improved, consecutively, by Lili Wen and Mark D. Seaborn.