Sensor Placement in Municipal Water Networks

TLDR

An optimal sensor configuration minimizes the expected fraction of the population at risk. The study presents a model for optimizing sensor placement in municipal water networks to detect maliciously injected contaminants. The authors formulate the problem as a mixed‑integer program that can be solved with generally available solvers. Optimal sensor placements were identified for three test networks, and the formulation was shown to solve quickly and remain robust to uncertainties in the data.

Abstract

We present a model for optimizing the placement of sensors in municipal water networks to detect maliciously injected contaminants. An optimal sensor configuration minimizes the expected fraction of the population at risk. We formulate this problem as a mixed-integer program, which can be solved with generally available solvers. We find optimal sensor placements for three test networks with synthetic risk and population data. Our experiments illustrate that this formulation can be solved relatively quickly and that the predicted sensor configuration is relatively insensitive to uncertainties in the data used for prediction.