Publications

Scheduling manual sampling for contamination detection in municipal water networks

Berry, Jonathan W.; Lin, Henry; Lauer, Erik; Phillips, Cynthia

Cities without an early warning system of indwelling sensors can consider monitoring their networks manually, especially during times of heightened security levels. We consider the problem of calculating an optimal schedule for manual sampling in a municipal water network. Preliminary computations with a small-scale example indicate that during normal times, manual sampling can provide some benefit, but it is far inferior to an indwelling sensor network. However, given information that significantly constrains the nature of an imminent threat, manual sampling can perform as well as a small sensor network designed to handle normal threats. Copyright ASCE 2006.