Optimal location of mobile sensors for environmental monitoring

This paper is devoted to the optimal location of a mobile sensor network for environmental monitoring applications. Effective pollution monitoring in the atmosphere or in hydraulic systems (rivers, lakes or seas) with a limited number of sensors is a very challenging issue. In this paper, we will only consider physical phenomena governed by the so-called advection-diffusion partial-differential equation (ADPDE). The paper goal is to derive a simple potential-based navigation strategy ensuring the optimal location of a mobile sensor network. The optimal location of the sensors is determined through the maximization of an observability index based on the observability gramian of the ADPDE derived from a spectral method. The application to the control of a 20-sensor network applied to a 2D air pollution model demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We can also emphasize the fact that the here-proposed methodology can be easily applied to the optimal location of static sensors.