Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA
Jorge Jimenez
Naval Surface Warfare Center, Panama City, FL, USA
Saurav Shrestha
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The Charles Edward Via, Jr., Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA
Nina Stark
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The Charles Edward Via, Jr., Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA
This paper addresses the challenges of optimally placing a finite number of sensors to detect Poisson-distributed targets in a bounded domain. We seek to rigorously account for uncertainty in the target arrival model throughout the problem. Sensor locations are selected to maximize the probability that no targets are missed. While this objective function is well-suited to applications where failure to detect targets is highly undesirable, it does not lead to a computationally efficient optimization problem. We propose an approximation of the objective function that is non-negative, submodular, and monotone and for which greedy selection of sensor locations works well. We also characterize the gap between the desired objective function and our approximation. For numerical illustrations, we consider the case of the detection of ship traffic using sensors mounted on the seafloor.
