Determining Object Safety Using a Multiagent, Collaborative System

Abstract

We consider the problem of object safety: how objects endowed with processing, communication, and sensing capabilities can determine their safety. We assign an agent to each object capable of looking out for its own self interests, while concurrently collaborating with its neighbors and learning/reinforcing its beliefs from them. After considering related work, we propose a general framework consisting of agents with case-bases of threat detection systems and a mechanism for sharing and confirming beliefs with other agents. While our approach is designed to be applicable to object safety domains in general, we particularly consider its application to transport chain security. We further propose a testing framework that uses real sensor data and object safety scenario simulations to evaluate our approach.