A Cooperative Multi-Agent System for Crowd Sensing Based Estimation in Smart Cities

Abstract

The concept of Smart City has spread as a solution to ensure better access to information and services to citizens, but also as a means to reduce the environmental footprint of cities. To this end, a continuous and wide observation of the environment is necessary to analyze information that enables government bodies to act on the environment appropriately. Moreover, a diffused acquisition of information requires adequate infrastructure and proper devices, which results in relevant installation and maintenance costs. Our proposal enables reducing the number of necessary sensors to be deployed while ensuring that information is available at any time and anywhere. We present the HybridIoT system to cope with the lack of environmental information in the urban context through an estimation technique that integrates heterogeneous data acquired from some different sensors. HybridIoT can be deployed in large-scale contexts and ensures data accessibility even if devices enter or leave the system at any time and everywhere. We compare the results to those obtained by state-of-the-art techniques to assess the validity of our proposal, in particular concerning the properties of openness, large-scale, and heterogeneity, of primary importance in the context of the development of systems to be deployed in the smart city context.

Keywords

• Smart city
• cooperative multi-agent systems
• missing information estimation
• heterogeneous data integration