Mobile Sensor Routing for Parameter Estimation of Distributed Systems Using the Parallel Tunneling Method

The paper deals with the problem of optimal path planning for a sensor network with mutliple mobile nodes, whose measurements are supposed to be primarily used to estimate unknown parameters of a system modelled by a partial differential equation. The adopted framework permits to consider two- or three-dimensional spatial domains and correlated observations. Since the aim is to maximize the accuracy of the estimates, a general functional defined on the relevant Fisher information matrix is used as the design criterion. Central to the approach is the parameterization of the sensor trajectories based on cubic B-splines. The resulting finite-dimensional global optimization problem is then solved using a parallel version of the tunneling algorithm. A numerical example is included to clearly demonstrate the idea presented in the paper.