Trust-based Cognitive Decision Making by Social Things - A Case Study of Cancer Treatment

Social things face great uncertainty and complexity in their decision-making. This is true whether the social thing is as large as the electric grid of a country or as small as drug carrier targeted nanomachines employed for cancer treatment. The problem is further complicated when it is tasked with serving humans, with the intricate and ill-defined meaning of service. Therefore, there is a need for cognitive decision-making in which human factors of time, attitude, attention, trust, and bias are considered in the recommendation, prediction, analysis, estimation, and automated decision making. Here, we introduce a trust-based decision-making architecture for swarms of bioinspired nanomachines. Particularly, the factor of trust is used as an index for swarm joining and disjoining. Each nanomachine's decision is considered as a new attitude that is weakened or reinforced by a trust factor. The trust factor is derived using a Fuzzy Cognitive Map which is composed of integrity, competence, consistency, loyalty, and openness. Nanomachines with high trust factors form a dense group and change to a “trustee” swarm. The trustee converges to the cancer site. The result shows the proposed method in targeted drug delivery outperforms the competing strategies with lower hypoxic and endothelial cell density as the marker of cancer.