Reasoning with Trust and Uncertainty Illustration in the Internet of Things

Trust and uncertainty are important aspects of many distributed systems. Managing them together forms a complex problem, even more in the domain of the Internet of Things (IoT), where having multiple sources of information is very common. The devices of the IoT face two-fold problems of managing trust on sources and the presence of uncertainty in the information. We propose a solution to these problems. Our solution approach involves modeling applications of the IoT as intelligent agents that comprise a trust management module, an inference engine and an enhanced Assumption-based Truth Maintenance System (ATMS) to manage trust of the information sources and uncertainty of the inferred information. We validate our approach using empirical data obtained from simulations.