An optimization for reducing the size of an existing urban-like monitoring network for retrieving an unknown point source emission

This study presents an optimization methodology for reducing the size of an existing monitoring network of the sensors measuring polluting substances in an urban-like environment in order to estimate an unknown emission source. The methodology is presented by coupling the simulated annealing (SA) algorithm with the renormalization inversion technique and the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling approach. This study presents an application of the renormalization data-assimilation theory for optimally reducing the size of an existing monitoring network in an urban-like environment. The performance of the obtained reduced optimal sensor networks is analyzed by reconstructing the unknown continuous point emission using the concentration measurements from the sensors in that optimized network. This approach is successfully applied and validated with 20 trials of the Mock Urban Setting Test (MUST) tracer field experiment in an urban-like environment. The main results consist of reducing the size of a fixed network of 40 sensors deployed in the MUST experiment. The optimal networks in the MUST urban region are determined, which makes it possible to reduce the size of the original network (40 sensors) to ∼1/3 (13 sensors) and 1∕4 (10 sensors). Using measurements from the reduced optimal networks of 10 and 13 sensors, the averaged location errors are obtained as 19.20 and 17.42 m, respectively, which are comparable to the 14.62 m obtained from the original 40-sensor network. In 80 % of the trials with networks of 10 and 13 sensors, the emission rates are estimated within a factor of 2 of the actual release rates. These are also comparable to the performance of the original network, whereby in 75 % of the trials the releases were estimated within a factor of 2 of the actual emission rates.