Trust-based situation awareness: Agent-based versus population-based modeling a comparative study

Trust based situation awareness represents the flow of information regarding a situation within a group of agents based on their mutual trust. Situation Awareness (SA) in general is regarded as basis for efficient group decision making while trust based situation awareness is of utmost importance in safety critical systems as the trust is a key factor that tend to affect the beliefs of agents that are collaborating in an environment. In this study an existing model of situation awareness is extended to incorporate mutual trust of the participating agents. The proposed model is analyzed using two different paradigms of computational modeling techniques namely Agent Based Modeling (ABM) and Population Based Modeling (PBM). Various experiments are conducted using variety of populations. Results show that with incorporation of trust factor, both approaches show similar patterns with large population size. In addition to that, relation between SA and trust is analyzed and the results show that SA gets affected by the inter-agent trust.