Optimal placement of distributed sensors against moving targets

This article addresses the problem of deploying a sparse network of sensors for surveillance of moving targets. The sensor networks of interest consist of sensors which perform independent binary detection on a target, and report detections to a central node for fusion. An optimization framework is developed for placement of sensors within a bounded search region, given sensor performance characteristics, prior information on anticipated target characteristics, and a distributed detection criteria. Individual sensor performance is represented parametrically as are priors on target dynamics. Several numerical examples are included that illustrate the utility of the optimization approach.