Optimal Deployment of Vehicular Mobile Air Quality Monitoring Systems

Air pollution is becoming a serious problem worldwide, especially in developing countries. In such circumstances, monitoring air quality becomes an urgent requirement to help people make plans and the government to make timely policies. Traditionally, air quality monitoring is handled by using monitoring stations located at fixed locations. However, due to the cost of installation, deployment, and operation, the number of monitoring stations deployed is often very small; thus, the monitored area is limited. In this paper, we consider a mobile air quality monitoring system that exploits the dynamic of the vehicles to broaden the monitoring area to deal with this problem. Specifically, we study how to place a given number of monitoring sensors on the vehicles to maximize the monitoring area. We propose two algorithms to calculate the monitored area and a GA-based approach to determine optimal buses for placing the sensors.