Holonic Multi-agent Systems to Integrate Independent Multi-sensor Platforms in Complex Surveillance

As far as a surveillance system is always integrated in an environment it has to adapt to possible changes that can occur in it. For this reason, it is not sufficient to install a series of sensors along the facilities to be guarded, as any modifications enormously increment the amount of data to be interpreted. Also, eventual failures or sabotages to the sensors produce the collapse of the system, which is not convenient at all in a potentially dangerous environment. Thus, the natural evolution of these systems is the integration in a compact system of intelligent platforms, which are able or not of moving in the environment, which possess several and complementary sensor types, and which interpret the information of each sensor coherently to offer the platform itself a fair service of surveillance. Quality of service is notably increased when there are a sufficient number of platforms forming a compact multi-agent system (MAS). Moreover, this MAS can itself be a compact subsystem of a superior hierarchy MAS composed of several subsystems. This is what we denominate recursive or holonic multi-agent systems.