The probe allocation problem

Surveillance problem in a variety of scenarios such as hostile environments, environmental monitoring and law enforcement missions (i.e. border patrol) etc have been widely studied. However, monitoring of traffic conditions in urban environments by deploying a team of agents is a novel problem not found in any existing literature. This problem is termed as the probe allocation problem. In light of the recent developments of automated cars, studies of such surveillance problems in urban environments will prove to be useful. The main purpose of this paper is to make a formal introduction to the probe allocation problem and propose an algorithm that solves it. A Singapore-scale simulation was carried out to study its performance.