Formation of Reliable Composite Teams for Collaborative Environmental Surveillance of Ecosystems

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to change many aspects of our daily lives thanks to the opportunity of interconnecting a massive numbers of smart objects with increasing computational, storage, communication, and power capabilities, in such a way making “smart” and “interactive” most of the world around us. In other words, smart objects and humans will be involved together in pervasive, proactive, and collaborative activities to orchestrate and execute increasingly complex and sophisticated tasks. In such a scenario, thanks also to a greater ecological awareness of people, a promising field of application for IoT technology is the monitoring of natural habitats in automatic or semiautomatic mode. A potentially effective and efficient solution is to form composite teams joining human operators and IoT devices. In such teams, not only the kind of team members will be different, i.e., humans and IoT devices, but also the IoT devices will be heterogeneous among them in terms of characteristics and performance. However, a basic requirement for a good team is the existence of high levels of mutual trust among its members. In other words, for the formation of a good team, it becomes of primary relevance to know and adequately represent the trustworthiness of the individual team members. To this end, our contribution can be summarized as (i) introducing a trust measure that takes into account both the reputation of devices and the accuracy of their measures; (ii) designing a framework that based on the proposed trust measure forms temporary teams for environmental ecosystems made of humans and IoT devices; and (iii) testing the proposed framework by simulating a collaborative environmental monitoring activity. The simulation results confirmed the advantages of the proposed approach in terms of performance and appreciation of the composite temporary teams that have been formed in this way.