A Participant Contribution Trust Scheme for Crisis Response Systems
Mohannad A. Alswailim, Hossam S. Hassanein, Mohammad Zulkernine · 2017
When a crisis occurs, an immediate response by rescue personnel is crucial. Decisions for a rescue plan are based solely on data about the crisis from the location. It stands to reason that increasing the amount of such data will result in a faster, efficient rescue response. To make this possible, a crisis response system accepts inputs from people near the crisis via their handheld sensor devices such as smartphones and tablets through a participatory sensing system. However, receiving data from the public could potentially result in corrupted and inaccurate data that will negatively impact the rescue plans. Given that risk, assessing the accuracy of the participant's data contribution becomes essential. In this paper, we present a Participant Contribution Trust (PCT) scheme. PCT aims to provide the crisis response system only with the trusted accurate contributions. The steps involved in filtering the contributions include splitting the crisis area into sectors, comparing the contributions with other intra- and inter-sector contributions and confirming the accuracy of the sensed data. Our experimental results show that PCT has a high detection rate for eliminating inaccurate contributions resulting in the delivery of the most accurate data to the crisis response system.