Title: Distributed consensus under ambiguous information

Authors: Gabriele Oliva; Stefano Panzieri; Roberto Setola

Addresses: Complex Systems and Security Laboratory, University Campus Biomedico of Rome, Via Álvaro del Portillo 21, 00128, Roma, Italy ' Dipartimento di Informatica e Automazione, University 'Roma TRE', Via della Vasca Navale, 79, 00146, Roma, Italy ' Complex Systems and Security Laboratory, University Campus Biomedico of Rome, Via Álvaro del Portillo 21, 00128, Roma, Italy

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).

Keywords: critical infrastructures; fuzzy systems; distributed consensus; distributed systems; ambiguous information; vague information; uncertainty; ambiguity; fuzzy logic; distributed agents; crisis management; emergency management; criticality.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSE.2013.053504

International Journal of System of Systems Engineering, 2013 Vol.4 No.1, pp.55 - 78

Received: 17 Oct 2012
Accepted: 29 Nov 2012
Published online: 28 Apr 2014 *

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