Using situation lattices in sensor analysis

Highly sensorised systems present two parallel challenges: how to design a sensor suite that can efficiently and cost-effectively support the needs of given services; and to extract the semantically relevant interpretations, or “situations”, from the flood of context data collected by the sensors. We describe mathematical structures called situation lattices that can be used to address these two problems simultaneously, allowing designers to both design and refine situation identification whilst offering insights into the design of sensor suites. We validate the accuracy and efficiency of our technique against a third-party data set and demonstrate how it can be used to evaluate sensor suite designs.