A Complex Networks Approach for Reliability Evaluation of Swarm Systems Under Malicious Attacks

Abstract

The reliability of swarm systems needs to be investigated because of their self-adaption and self-organized features. Previous studies mainly focused on the reliability of a single agent, whereas for swarm systems, the ability to maintain their overall connection and function under adverse conditions is more important. It remains challenging on how to evaluate the reliability of swarm systems at the system level. In this paper, we present a reliability evaluation method for swarm systems by characterizing the behavior of the whole system using the method of temporal network analysis. A novel comprehensive reliability metric, i.e. cooperation reliability (CR), is proposed, considering both system integrity and motion consensus. Meanwhile, by identifying critical individuals in swarm systems, we design different malicious attack strategies. It is found that the malicious attacks perform much more harmfully to the reliability of swarm systems than noise and random attack. Moreover, we find that the reliability of a swarm system is sensitive to the swarm density in our framework due to the dynamical interaction of the system. Our findings may shed light on understanding the complicated behaviors of swarm systems under attack and designing a more robust swarm system.

Analysis of Temporal Robustness in Massive Machine Type Communications

“…The work in [33] defines the temporal robustness metric as the ratio between the average degree of nodes after and before the network disruption. Moreover, work in [34] has introduced a new reliability measurement and named it cooperation reliability (CR) which captures both system integrity and motion consensus for swarm systems. This work confirms that the reliability of the swarm system varies with the density of the network agents.…”

A bio-inspired spatial defence strategy for collective decision making in self-organized swarms

“…On the application perspective, guaranteeing the safety of operations of swarms of robots outside the lab is emerging as a crucial issue [10,11,18]. Several approaches of defence strategy are understudy, from applications of blockchain technology [21] to complex network analysis to evaluate the resiliency of the swarm [12].…”