Multi-Agent System Based Wireless Sensor Network for Crisis Management

Abstract

During a crisis situation, the incident commanders have to tackle several problems simultaneously, e.g., (1) the monitoring of a crisis evolution, (2) guiding and tracking of rescue persons and intervention robots, (3) monitoring rescue persons' health, etc. Thus, several solutions based on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and cellular networks have been proposed. However, the real life experience has proved that the cellular networks' base stations may be collapsed or unreachable during a crisis situation. In addition, the WSNs have been generally deployed for one application, e.g., monitoring of an occurring event. However, today technologies offer sensor nodes (SN) with higher processing and communication capacity. Based on these capacities, this paper proposes a WSN solution, for crisis management, which is not based on any base station infrastructure. This solution proposes a tracking and data aggregation methods that could be run simultaneously to treat the three above mentioned problems. It is also empowered by a multi-agent system (MAS), which allows the SNs to cooperate and to better manage their batteries. Finally, the proposed solution has proved, through successive simulations, its efficiency in terms of tracking precision, end-to-end communication delay and power optimization.