A Location Problem in Sensor Systems Considering System Reliability

This chapter considers an optimal coverage location problem considering system reliability. We use identical sensors to cover a service area, in which each sensor can cover a circular area with a given radius. The sensors are imperfect and can fail with a given probability. The system coverage ratio is defined as the area covered by working sensors to the whole service area. System reliability is defined as the expectation of the system coverage ratio. Numerical and simulation methods were used to calculate the system reliability. We want to determine the locations of sensors to maximize the system reliability for the given sensor reliability and coverage radius. Several location methods are proposed and evaluated by numerical examples. Finally, we combined the heuristic locations as an initial solution in genetic algorithm (GA) and obtained good performance. Our findings indicate that employing heuristic locations in GA can effectively improve the system reliability performance in sensor systems.