A swarm of Mini-MEs: reasoning and information aggregation in ubiquitous multi-agent contexts

Collaborative paradigms are essential in ubiquitous computing. Swarm intelligence can deal with complex problems deriving from the intrinsically unpredictable nature of mobile and pervasive scenarios. This paper introduces a novel reasoning framework for information fusion in multi-agent systems, encompassing a data dissemination protocol and non-standard, non-monotonic inference services. It enables agents to integrate detected and received information in a coherent view. Its properties include reconciliation of inconsistencies, quick adaptation to changes and robustness against spurious events. The paper presents the above generalized framework along with an experimental evaluation of a prototypical implementation supported by a swarm of pico-reasoners.