Knowledge aggregation with subjective logic in multi-agent self-adaptive cyber-physical systems

Abstract

Modern software systems, such as cyber-physical systems (CPSs), operate in complex and dynamic environments. With the continuous and unanticipated change in the operational environment, these systems are subjected to a variety of uncertainties. Self-adaptive CPSs (SACPSs) can adjust their behavior or structure at run-time as a response to the changes in their perceived environment. Namely, self-adaptation is commonly realized through a MAPE-K feedback loop incorporating newly derived knowledge obtained by the sensed data from the run-time monitoring, during the operation of decentralized SACPSs. However, to build the knowledge, the need for run-time observations' aggregation and reasoning emerges, since the observations made by the decentralized systems might be conflicting. In this paper, we propose an approach for observations aggregation and knowledge modeling in SACPSs that is domain-independent and can deal with inaccurate, partial, and conflicting observations, based on the formalisms of Subjective Logic.