Intelligent design of sensor networks for data-driven sensor maintenance at railways

With rapid advances in digitization, many critical processes in transportation, industries, and our daily life rely on sensor measurements. With time, however, the measurements may get gradually biased and their precision deteriorates, leading to an enhanced risk of major disruptions caused by false sensor measurements. All single sensor measurements are uncertain and deviate from the true value. To detect malfunctioning sensors early on, a set of recent measurements of each sensor has to be constantly cross-checked against the measurements of a given number of other sensors, i.e., sensors should form a diagnosable network.

In this article, we examine the intelligent positioning of safety-relevant sensors at railways such that the installed sensors can constantly cross-check each other and the number of the required sensors is minimized. The arising sensor positioning problem (SPP) belongs to the family of the coordinated set covering problems with two binary matrices: the choice of columns in one matrix implies the selection of specific columns and rows in the other matrix. We formulate an integer program, provide some formal analysis of the SPP and design a customized large neighborhood search metaheuristic RuM, which finds close-to-optimality solutions fast. In our computational experiments, we show that if we ignore the diagnosability requirement, the installed sensors cannot sufficiently cross-check each other in most cases. However, it costs only a few (or even no) additional sensors to ensure the diagnosability of the sensor network.