This paper focuses on the extension of the transferable belief model (TBM) to a multiagent-distributed context where no central aggregation unit is available and the information can be exchanged only locally among agents. In this framework, agents are assumed to be independent reliable sources which collect data and collaborate to reach a common knowledge about an event of interest. Two different scenarios are considered: In the first one, agents are supposed to provide observations which do not change over time (static scenario), while in the second one agents are assumed to dynamically gather data over time (dynamic scenario). A protocol for distributed data aggregation, which is proved to converge to the basic belief assignment given by an equivalent centralized aggregation schema based on the TBM, is provided. Since multiagent systems represent an ideal abstraction of actual networks of mobile robots or sensor nodes, which are envisioned to perform the most various kind of tasks, we believe that the proposed protocol paves the way to the application of the TBM in important engineering fields such as multirobot systems or sensor networks, where the distributed collaboration among players is a critical and yet crucial aspect.

In this work the data aggregation problem for a multi-agent system within the framework of Theory of Evidence is investigated. In the proposed scenario, agents are assumed to be independent reliable sources which collect data and collaborate to reach a common knowledge. In particular, each agent is supposed to provide a set of observations which does not change over time. A protocol for distributed data aggregation for graph-like network topologies is designed. Experimental results with a sensor network have been carried out to corroborate the theoretical results and the feasibility of the proposed approach.