Research on placement of water quality sensor in water distribution systems

Water quality sensor placement refers to the arrangement of water quality sensors in water distribution systems to test the contaminant. The optimization problem is essentially a kind of large scale combinatorial optimization problem. At present, many literatures come down to the problem of the set covering problem or maximum coverage. The former mainly consider the minimum number of sensors, while the latter is a major research on the optimal sensor arrangement. In this paper, we have comprehensively considered the characteristic of covering and the maximum set covering problem. The optimization goal is the maximization of detection likelihood and its optimal arrangement and to minimize the number of water quality sensor in the network. We have given the relationship between the detection likelihood and the number of water quality sensor so as to provide some technique support for the early warning and monitoring system.