A general-purpose method for Pareto optimal placement of flow rate and concentration sensors in networked systems - With application to wastewater treatment plants

The advent of affordable computing, low-cost sensor hardware, and high-speed and reliable communi-cations have spurred ubiquitous installation of sensors in complex engineered systems. However, ensuring reliable data quality remains a challenge. Exploitation of redundancy among sensor signals can help improving the precision of measured variables, detecting the presence of gross errors, and identifying faulty sensors. The cost of sensor ownership, maintenance efforts in particular, can still be cost-prohibitive however. Maximizing the ability to assess and control data quality while minimizing the cost of ownership thus requires a careful sensor placement. To solve this challenge, we develop a generally applicable method to solve the multi-objective sensor placement problem in systems governed by linear and bilinear balance equations. Importantly, the method computes all Pareto-optimal sensor layouts with conventional computational resources and requires no information about the expected sensor quality. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.