An Optimal Cost-Effective Approach to Sensor Siting for Industrial Facilities

Perimeter or fenceline monitoring for emissions of hazardous gases is very important for hazardous waste sites, landfills, and industrial facilities. The fenceline monitoring is intended to protect the surrounding environment and nearby communities through an early warning system which allows exposed individuals to take necessary actions such as shelter-in-place or evacuation, while helping site owners to reduce potential liability with respect to site activities. Monitoring in general must be infused with new technologies to provide better and more cost-effective methods. In this study, an optimal cost-effective approach is proposed to find the locations of the minimum required number of sensors on the fenceline of industrial facilities with any complex geometry for one or multiple hazard points. The set of sensors for all wind direction is obtained using a defined toxic level of concern (LOC), the geometry of the fenceline and its relative location with respect to identified hazard points.  The result is optimized by considering sensors overlapping coverage. Sensor placement results can further be refined by taking into account the population distribution and site wind rose. The proposed approach is applied to real plant sites and the results show a considerable reduction in number of required sensors compared to previous studies, which leads to decrease in the capital and maintenance cost.