Optimal multi-type sensor placements in Gaussian spatial fields for environmental monitoring

Abstract

As citizens are increasingly concerned about the surrounding environment, it is important for modern cities to provide sufficient and accurate environmental information to the public for decision making in the era of smart cities. Due to limited budget, we often need to optimize the sensor placement in order to maximize the overall information gain according to certain criteria. Existing work is primarily concerned with single-type sensor placement; however, the environment usually requires accurate measurements of multiple type of environment characteristics. In this paper, we focus on the optimal multi-type sensor placement in Gaussian spatial field for environmental monitoring. We study two representative cases: the one-with-all case when each station is equipped with all types of sensors and the general case when each station is equipped with at least one type of sensor. We propose two greedy algorithms accordingly, each with a provable approximation guarantee. We evaluate the proposed approach via an application in air quality monitoring scenario in Hong Kong and experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.