Multi-objective evolutionary algorithms for sensor network design

Many sensor network design problems are characterized by the need to optimize multiple conflicting objectives. However, existing approaches generally focus on a single objective (ignoring the others), or combine multiple objectives into a single function to be optimized, to facilitate the application of classical optimization algorithms. This restricts their ability and constrains their usefulness to the network designer. A much more appropriate and natural approach is to address multiple objectives simultaneously, applying recently developed multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) in solving sensor network design problems. This chapter describes and illustrates this approach by modeling two sensor network design problems (mobile agent routing and sensor placement), as multi-objective optimization problems, developing the appropriate objective functions and discussing the tradeoffs between them. Simulation results using two recently developed MOEAs, viz., EMOCA (Rajagopalan, Mohan, Mehrotra, & Varshney, 2006) and NSGA-II (Deb, Pratap, Agarwal, & Meyarivan, 2000), show that these MOEAs successfully discover multiple solutions characterizing the tradeoffs between the objectives.