Sensor allocation in a forest fire monitoring system: a bi-objective approach

Abstract

Forests worldwide have been suffering from fires damages, provoking incalculable losses in fauna and flora, economic losses, people and animals' deaths, among other problems. To avoid forest fires catastrophes, it is fundamental to develop innovative operations, such as a forest fire monitoring system. This work concentrates efforts on defining the optimum sensor allocation in a forest fires monitoring system based on a wireless sensor network. Thus, a bi-objective mathematical model is developed to solve the problem, in which the first objective consists of minimising the forest fire hazard of a given forest region, and the second objective refers to the sensors spreading into this region. The developed mathematical model was solved by genetic algorithm and the results demonstrated that the methodology was capable of presenting suitable solutions for the problem.