In this paper, we describes the information-theoretic approaches to sensor selection and sensor placement in sensor networks for target localization and tracking. We have developed a sensor selection heuristic to activate the most informative candidate sensor for collaborative target localization and tracking. The fusion of the observation by the selected sensor with the prior target location distribution yields nearly the greatest reduction of the entropy of the expected posterior target location distribution. Our sensor selection heuristic is computationally less complex and thus more suitable to sensor networks with moderate computing power than the mutual information sensor selection criteria. We have also developed a method to compute the posterior target location distribution with the minimum entropy that could be achieved by the fusion of observations of the sensor network with a given deployment geometry. We have found that the covariance matrix of the posterior target location distribution with the minimum entropy is consistent with the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRB) of the target location estimate. Using the minimum entropy of the posterior target location distribution, we have characterized the effect of the sensor placement geometry on the localization accuracy.

In this paper, we implement an estimation procedure for a particular mathematical programming activity-based model in order to estimate the relative importance of factors associated with spatial and temporal interrelationships among the out-of-home activities that motivate a household’s need or desire to travel. The method uses a genetic algorithm to estimate coefficient values of the utility function, based on a particular multidimensional sequence alignment method to deal with the nominal, discrete, attributes of the activity/travel pattern (e.g., which household member performs which activity, which vehicle is used, sequencing of activities), and a time sequence alignment method to handle temporal attributes of the activity pattern (e.g., starting and ending time of each activity and/or travel). The estimation procedure is tested on data drawn from a well-know activity/travel survey.

We propose a novel entropy-based sensor selection heuristic for localization. Given 1) a prior probability distribution of the target location, and 2) the locations and the sensing characteristics of a set of additional sensors, we would like to select an optimal additional sensor such that fusion of its measurements with existing information would yield the greatest entropy reduction of the target location distribution. The heuristic can select a sub-optimal additional sensor without retrieving the measurements of candidate sensors. The heuristic is computationally much simpler than the mutual information based sensor selection approaches for localization and tracking [1, 2]. Just as those existing approaches do, the heuristic greedily selects one sensor in each step.

We propose an entropy-based sensor selection heuristic for localization. Given 1) a prior probability distribution of the target location, and 2) the locations and the sensing models of a set of candidate sensors for selection, the heuristic selects an informative sensor such that the fusion of the selected sensor observation with the prior target location distribution would yield on average the greatest or nearly the greatest reduction in the entropy of the target location distribution. The heuristic greedily selects one sensor in each step without retrieving any actual sensor observations. The heuristic is also computationally much simpler than the mutual-information-based approaches. The effectiveness of the heuristic is evaluated using localization simulations in which Gaussian sensing models are assumed for simplicity. The heuristic is more effective when the optimal candidate sensor is more informative.