Context-aware reconfiguration of large-scale surveillance systems: argumentative approach

Abstract

The Metis research project aims at supporting maritime safety and security by facilitating continuous monitoring of vessels in national coastal waters and prevention of phenomena, such as vessel collisions, environmental hazard, or detection of malicious intents, such as smuggling. Surveillance systems such as Metis typically comprise a number of heterogeneous information sources and information aggregators. Among the main problems of their deployment lies their scalability with respect to a potentially large number of monitored entities. One of the solutions to the problem is continuous and timely adaptation and reconfiguration of the system according to the changing environment it operates in. At any given timepoint, the system should use only a minimal set of information sources and aggregators needed to facilitate effective and early detection of indicators of interest. Here, we describe the Metis system prototype and introduce a theoretical framework for modelling scalable information-aggregation systems. We model information-aggregation systems as networks of inter-dependent reasoning agents, each representing a mechanism for justification/refutation of a conclusion derived by the agent. The proposed continuous reconfiguration algorithm relies on standard results from abstract argumentation and corresponds to computation of a grounded extension of the argumentation framework associated with the system. Finally, we demonstrate the flexibility of the presented framework by extending the proposed algorithm to adapt to context-dependent changes in information sources availability, as well as shifts in system's focus according to its context.

Keywords:

• applications of argumentation technology
• context-aware configuration & reconfiguration
• information-aggregation agents
• heterogeneous information sources
• grounded semantics
• maritime traffic surveillance

Conflict of interest disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Peter Novák http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7015-4297

Notes

1. Without loss of generality we may assume that for all variables it holds that there exists an agent such that .

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Dutch national programme COMMIT. The research was carried out as a part of the Metis project under the responsibility of the TNO-Embedded Systems Innovation, with Thales Nederland B.V. as the carrying industrial partner.