Ontology-Based Emotional Decision-Making in Self-Evolving Defensive Agents

Responding instantaneously in an unprecedented situation is inevitable to mitigate zero day attacks in the cyber world. This situation has strong resemblance with the fight for survival in biological world. Both being complex systems, the biological world and the cyber world have structural similarities. Emotions are the key factor used by biological beings to take intuitive decisions, which are key to survival in the natural world. Inspired from the idea of emotional decision making in natural world and the structural similarity shown by biological and cyber worlds, this paper proposes an ontological mechanism to implement artificial emotion-based decision making for autonomous agents in cyber security scenario. Emotions are modelled as manifestation of the goals of agents. Stimuli and response are connected through emotions using the ontological structure. The mechanism is proven useful in eliciting appropriate response for the stimuli using ontological reasoning through SPARQL queries.