Safety Monitoring System by Autonomous Mobile Sensors Utilizing Pheromone Communication

Highly reliable safety monitoring systems are indispensable for operating large-scale systems, such as nuclear power plants. This paper proposes anew type of reliable safety monitoring system employing a small number of autonomous decentralized mobile sensors. The new system is called ant-like sensor system (ALSS), and consists of autonomous sensors utilizing pheromone communication. Each sensor moves around, leaving the markings of repulsive pheromone that indicate that the sensor has visited the surveillance point. All sensors move while avoiding points marked with pheromone scattered by other sensors. The pheromone at the point gradually evaporates, so that after a time sensors visit the point again. Our computer simulation shows the optimal design parameters for ALSS, such as quantities of scattered pheromone information. Moreover, in design of field, allocation problem of devices for conserving the pheromone information is discussed and the optimal interval between the devices is determined