Abstract
This chapter describes how formal information measures can be used as the basis for enabling decentralised, intelligent and autonomous control of large-scale sensor network resources, with widespread application throughout the military and security domain. These information measures are the result of filtering and fusing local sensor observations, assimilating the products over a communication network, and interpreting them in the wider context to infer underlying states of interest to the military or security operation. Information provides a currency against which a constrained set of sensing and communication actions can be valued, resulting in a single action or sequence of actions being executed. This is known as Information-Based Control (IBC). The main focus of this chapter is the problem of decentralised IBC in a large-scale sensor network, and its solution in terms of multi-agent system methodologies. Examples and applications, relevant to the military world, are used to highlight a number of important practical considerations.
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Nicholson, D., Ramchurn, S.D., Rogers, A. (2007). Information-Based Control of Decentralised Sensor Networks. In: Pěchouček, M., Thompson, S.G., Voos, H. (eds) Defence Industry Applications of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. Whitestein Series in Software Agent Technologies and Autonomic Computing. Birkhäuser Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7643-8571-2_2
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