Title: Distributed opinion dynamics with heterogeneous reputation

Authors: Estefanía Etchevés Miciolino; Gabriele Oliva; Roberto Setola

Addresses: Complex Systems and Security Laboratory, University Campus Bio-Medico of Rome, Via A. del Portillo 21, 00128 Roma, Italy ' Complex Systems and Security Laboratory, University Campus Bio-Medico of Rome, Via A. del Portillo 21, 00128 Roma, Italy ' Complex Systems and Security Laboratory, University Campus Bio-Medico of Rome, Via A. del Portillo 21, 00128 Roma, Italy

Abstract: The Hegelsmann-Krause Opinion Dynamics model provides a description of the social behaviour of humans among which a decision making process is taking place. In contrast to simpler agreement models, the opinions are not granted to converge to a single value, but may eventually split. Within such a framework, each agent is influenced by the others provided that the difference in their opinion does not exceed a threshold, which is common to all the agents. In this paper, we introduce an extension where each agent is associated with a different threshold value representing the reliability of the information carried by the agent. Moreover, we consider an additional topological constraint in order to take into account also geographical proximity, and the result is a distributed data aggregation and decision making algorithm.

Keywords: distributed systems; opinion dynamics; situation awareness; social behaviour; decision making; threshold values; information reliability; geographical proximity; distributed data aggregation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSE.2013.057657

International Journal of System of Systems Engineering, 2013 Vol.4 No.3/4, pp.277 - 290

Received: 23 May 2013
Accepted: 26 Jun 2013
Published online: 28 Apr 2014 *

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