Multi-agent systems for protecting critical infrastructures: A survey

Multi-agent systems have emerged as a very significant platform in provisioning distributed and collaborative services to critical applications. Such applications require ubiquitous agent presence in the environment for monitoring, collecting data, communication, and subsequent data analysis, where the sensitivity of the application’s nature cannot be understated. Recent advances in the field of autonomous, ubiquitous, intelligent and distributed computing have led to corresponding developments in the use of collaborating multi-agents to protect critical infrastructures. Such systems have witnessed crucial demand for deployment in diverse application scenarios such as E-commerce, E-health, Network Intrusion Detection, Telematics and Transport Systems, Environmental Monitoring, as well as for distributed information processing in general. Critical infrastructures have longed for a distributed system in place for their uninterrupted and accurate operations. Multi-agents have provided one such approach towards addressing the issue of protecting such infrastructures through collaborative and distributed information processing. In this paper, a state-of-the-art on the use of multi-agent based systems for protecting five most common critical infrastructures, is presented. & 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.