Sensor placement for detecting propagative sources in populated environments

We consider the placement of sensors to detect propagative sources where the sensing area of each sensor is anisotropic and arbitrarily-shaped due to the terrain and meteorological conditions. The propagation and detection times are non-negligible due to the propagation of source effects through space at a slow speed. We formulate the problem as placing the minimum number of sensors to ensure a detection time T and the coverage utility C. Both the sensing areas of sensors and the utility function U (·) are chosen to capture the environmental factors and the population distribution. We show this problem to be NP-hard, and present heuristic algorithms for 1-coverage and k-coverage by adopting exiting methods. We evaluate the proposed algorithms in the realistic setting of Port of Memphis where the objective is to protect the population against chemical leaks or attacks. We utilize the SCIPUFF dispersion model to determine the sensing areas by accounting for the terrain and meteorological conditions, and use the real-life population distribution as the utility function. Based on empirical study, we make several important observations.