Process refinement using Biosensor location problem

Complex biological sensor performance drives the decisions of which sensors to include into the tiered testing approach of a combined sensor system to achieve high confidence results. The goal is to decrease the ldquotime to confirmationrdquo while increasing confidence in the test results. This research develops a mathematical formulation for solving the Biosensor location problem derived with an Ontological approach toward Sensor Management. Initially an Integer Programming formulation is developed in order to obtain an optimal sensor allocation for a given area utilizing the Ontology information of the biosensors. However, due to the combinatorial nature of the problem, the storage and solution time requirement to solve the IP Model grows exponentially with the size of the problem. We have developed two heuristic models to obtain good solutions to the sensor location problem. Then we have statistically analyzed the various parameters on sensor locating cost and heuristic running time.