Stochastic Optimization of Sensor's Deployment Location over Terrain to Maximize Viewshed Coverage Area for a Fixed Number of Sensors Scenario
Vivek Sen Saxena, Rahul Shukla, Siddharth Khandelwal · 2022
Viewshed coverage serves as an effective metric to determine individual sensor's area coverage. For a set of mid to long-range sensors, terrain topography plays an important role for their cumulative area coverage (while reducing blind spot area). Hence, it is extremely important to find the optimal sites for deployment of such set of sensors over Area Of Interest (AOI). This turns out to be an optimization problem, which cannot be solved using traditional methods because of its high computational complexity but a near-optimal solution can be obtained using heuristic and meta-heuristic techniques. In this paper, we propose a genetic algorithm-based approach to find the optimal deployment location for a set of sensors that maximize cumulative viewshed coverage. Further, a heuristic methodology based on terrain features (ridgelines) is used to reduce computation time for final coverage convergence. This kind of terrain analysis results in a decision support tool that can be used before actually deploying such mid to long-range sensors over terrain.