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TrustSets: using trust to detect deceitful agents in a distributed information collecting system

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Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of maintaining information coherence and its robustness in a multi-agent system, that collectively gathers information from distributed sources and where some sources may be defective (deliberately or not). In this context, the collective information gathered by the system is a progressive (non linear) aggregation of information collected individually by each agent. Therefore, each agent has direct information (collected by itself) and indirect information (obtained through communication with other agents). System coherence is defined by compatibility of collected information about the explored environment with actual information of the environment. System resilience is defined by the capability to maintain information coherence, despite the existence and increase of faulty agents within the system. In this context, we propose a new trust-based mechanism to detect defective agents and limit the dissemination of deceitful information in the system, thus reducing its impact on the process of collective information gathering.

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Notes

  1. “move” can have various meaning depending on the environment.

  2. Note we do not address here the problem of the localization on the map, and thus we are not interested in the issue of the Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) widely studied in robotics (Leonard and Durrant-Whyte 1991).

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Correspondence to Quang-Anh Nguyen Vu.

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Nguyen Vu, QA., Canal, R., Gaudou, B. et al. TrustSets: using trust to detect deceitful agents in a distributed information collecting system. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 3, 251–263 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-012-0140-0

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