Distributed consensus under ambiguous information. (1st January 2013)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Oliva, Gabriele; Panzieri, Stefano; Setola, Roberto
• Is Part Of: International journal of system of systems engineering. Volume 4:Number 1(2013)
• Page Start: 55
• Page End: 78
• Publication Date: 2013-01-01
• Subjects: critical infrastructures -- fuzzy systems -- consensus -- distributed systems; 003.71
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1748-0671

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of composing different ambiguous and vague pieces of information without a central authority through a set of distributed agents, each with limited perspective, converging to a shared point of view by exchanging information only with a reduced subset of nodes (i.e., their respective neighbourhood). To this end, the distributed consensus problem is extended in the fuzzy fashion. As a result, the framework allows to compose several heterogeneous and ambiguous/linguistically expressed opinions in a decentralised way, both in terms of value with higher belief and in terms of ambiguity associated to the final agreement value. The proposed framework is applied to a case study related to crisis management for critical infrastructures, where human operators, each able to observe directly the state of a given infrastructure (or of a given area considering the vast and geographically dispersed infrastructures), reach a distributed consensus on the overall criticality of a situation expressed in a linguistic, fuzzy way. Such a consensus is reached in terms of actual severity of the scenario (single integrators) or in terms of both severity and evolution tendency (double integrators).