A Cluster-Based Approach for Disturbed, Spatialized, Distributed Information Gathering Systems

In a distributed spatialized information collecting system managed by a swarm of agents, where some are supposed disturbed, the maintenance of the system coherence and cooperation between reliable elements is a challenge. This paper tackles the problem of finding an efficient mechanism to ensure the coherence of the system and to optimize system performance. The main contribution of this paper consists of two major steps: (i) use trust-based mechanism to ensure the coherence and the robustness of the system; (ii) allow reliable elements to create dynamic clusters based on trust. We propose two different organizations in order to manage these issues and show how they must interact: a social one in which each agent maintains a TrustSet to estimate trust on others; a spacial one in which reliable elements are grouped in an "ad hoc type" network to improve cooperation between themselves.