Publications

Water quality sensor placement in water networks with budget constraints

Berry, Jonathan W.; Hart, William E.; Phillips, Cynthia A.

In recent years, several integer programming models have been proposed to place sensors in municipal water networks in order to detect intentional or accidental contamination. Although these initial models assumed that it is equally costly to place a sensor at any place in the network, there clearly are practical cost constraints that would impact a sensor placement decision. Such constraints include not only labor costs but also the general accessibility of a sensor placement location. In this paper, we extend our integer program to explicitly model the cost of sensor placement. We partition network locations into groups of varying placement cost, and we consider the public health impacts of contamination events under varying budget constraints. Thus our models permit cost/benefit analyses for differing sensor placement designs. As a control for our optimization experiments, we compare the set of sensor locations selected by the optimization models to a set of manually-selected sensor locations.