A Novel Approach to Sensor Placement: Recursive Exhaustive Search and Stochastic Optimization Parameter Impact Analysis

This study presents a comprehensive approach for single sensor placement optimization in two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces. A traditional exhaustive search technique and a novel method called recursive exhaustive search are used to place a sensor in a way that maximizes the area coverage metric. Exhaustive search provides a baseline by methodically evaluating all potential placements, while recursive exhaustive search innovates by segmenting the search process into more manageable, recursive steps. Our findings highlight the significant impact of two key parameters, the number of evaluations and the rasterization value, on the achieved coverage and computation time. The results show that the right choice of parameters can significantly reduce the computational effort without compromising the quality of the solution. This underlines the critical need for a balanced approach that considers both computational complexity and placement efficacy. We show that exhaustive search is not feasible for three-dimensional environment models and propose to establish a modified exhaustive search method as a ground truth for the single sensor placement problem. We then explore nature-inspired genetic algorithms and the impact of the number of evaluations of the optimization function for these algorithms on both accuracy and computational cost.