Information-driven cooperation on adaptive cyber-physical systems

Cooperation among competitive populations hinges on trustworthy information usually obtained through personal experiences (private information) and social influence (public information) which often is obtained through interactions in the cyberspace. To reveal the coupled dynamics between information propagation on the cyberspace and evolutionary games in the physical world, we propose a double-layer dynamical graph model for adaptive cyber-physical systems. The reputation information aggregated from the cyber layer can be used for the decision-making in the physical layer, meanwhile the population evolution and competition in the physical layer will reorganise the information network in the cyber layer. Our results show that public and private information on the trustworthiness of others can play significantly different roles in the decision-making to cooperate or defect, leading to very different performance in the global prosperity of the population. Limited consideration for the available public information reduces the benefits of the reorganization of the information network in the cyber layer leading to the increasing of mutual defections. On the other way, when public information is prioritized, the reorganization of the cyber layer can facilitate cooperation. However, the optimal decision-making to maximize population prosperity strongly depends on the way the cyber layer is reorganized and on the opportune balance of public and private information. Our results highlight the importance of the interplay between information reliability and restructuring of the cyber layer for the resilience of cooperation and prosperity in cyber-physical systems.