Hierarchical Analysis Process for Belief Management in Internet of Drones

Group awareness is playing a major role in the efficiency of mission planning and decision-making processes, particularly those involving spatially distributed collaborative entities. The performance of this concept has remarkably increased with the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT). Indeed, a myriad of innovative devices are being extensively deployed to collaboratively recognize and track events, objects, and activities of interest. A wide range of IoT-based approaches have focused on representing and managing shared information through formal operators for group awareness. However, despite their proven results, these approaches are still refrained by the inaccuracy of information being shared between the collaborating distributed entities. In order to address this issue, we propose in this paper a new belief-management-based model for a collaborative Internet of Drones (IoD). The proposed model allows drones to decide the most appropriate operators to apply in order to manage the uncertainty of perceived or received information in different situations. This model uses Hierarchical Analysis Process (AHP) with Subjective Logic (SL) to represent and combine opinions of different sources. We focus on purely collaborative drone networks where the group awareness will also be provided as service to collaborating entities.