Coverage and mobile sensor placement for vehicles on predetermined routes: a greedy heuristic approach

Road potholes are not only nuisance but can also damage vehicles and pose serious safety risks for drivers. Recently, a number of approaches have been developed for automatic pothole detection using equipment such as accelerometers, image sensors or LIDARs. Mounted on vehicles, such as taxis or buses, the sensors can automatically detect potholes as the vehicles carry out their normal operation. While prior work focused on improving the performance of a standalone device, it simply assumed that the sensors would be installed on the entire fleet of vehicles. When the number of sensors is limited it is important to select an optimal set of vehicles to make sure that they do not cover similar routes in order to maximize the total coverage of roads inspected by sensors. The paper investigates this problem for vehicles that follow pre-determined routes, formulates it as a linear optimization problem and proposes a solution based on a greedy heuristic. The proposed approach has been tested on an official London bus route dataset containing 713 routes and showed up to 78% improvement compared to a random sensor placement selected as a baseline algorithm.