%0 Journal Article %T Market-Based Approach to Mobile Surveillance Systems %A Ahmed M. Elmogy %A Alaa M. Khamis %A Fakhri O. Karray %J Journal of Robotics %D 2012 %I Hindawi Publishing Corporation %R 10.1155/2012/841291 %X The active surveillance of public and private sites is increasingly becoming a very important and critical issue. It is, therefore, imperative to develop mobile surveillance systems to protect these sites. Modern surveillance systems encompass spatially distributed mobile and static sensors in order to provide effective monitoring of persistent and transient objects and events in a given area of interest (AOI). The realization of the potential of mobile surveillance requires the solution of different challenging problems such as task allocation, mobile sensor deployment, multisensor management, cooperative object detection and tracking, decentralized data fusion, and interoperability and accessibility of system nodes. This paper proposes a market-based approach that can be used to handle different problems of mobile surveillance systems. Task allocation and cooperative target tracking are studied using the proposed approach as two challenging problems of mobile surveillance systems. These challenges are addressed individually and collectively. 1. Introduction One of the most active research topics is how to automate surveillance tasks based on mobile and fixed sensors platforms [1]. Many benefits can be anticipated from the use of multisensor systems in surveillance applications [2, 3], such as decreasing task completion time and increasing mission reliability. Generally, monitoring of public and private sites is the main application of multisensor surveillance systems. The primary objectives of the surveillance systems are to provide the information that makes the system able to understand and predict the actions and the interactions of the observed objects in order to carry out different tasks. Examples of these tasks would include target search, identification, and tracking. Advanced surveillance systems encompass spatially distributed mobile and static sensors in order to provide effective monitoring of persistent and transient objects and events in a given area of interest (AOI) [4]. Mobile surveillance systems incorporate self-organized networks of mobile sensing nodes of different modalities, data and information fusion nodes, acting nodes, and control nodes. These self-organized nodes can collaboratively and continuously sense within the volume of interest, as well as physically manipulate and interact with it. The main goal of the surveillance system is to adjust the sensing conditions for improved visibility, and thereby improve performance [5]. In such setting, surveillance is a complex problem posing many challenging problems. This paper %U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jr/2012/841291/