Dynamic Plume Tracking Utilizing Symbiotic Heterogeneous Remote Sensing Platforms

Abstract : The current study focuses on the problem of continuously tracking a dynamically evolving $$CH_4$$CH4 plume utilizing a mutually built consensus by heterogeneous sensing platforms: mobile and static sensors. Identifying the major complexities and emergent dynamics (leakage source, intensity, time) of such problem, a distributed, multi-agent, optimization algorithm was developed and evaluated in an indoor continuous plume-tracking application (where reaction time is critical due to the limited volume available for air saturation by the $$CH_4$$CH4 dispersion). The high-fidelity ANSYS Fluent suite realistic simulation environment was used to acquire the gas diffusion evolution through time. The analysis of the simulation results indicated that the proposed algorithm was capable of continuously readapting the mobile sensing platforms formation according to the density and the dispersed volume plume; combining additive information from the static sensors. Moreover, a scalability analysis with respect to the number of mobile platforms revealed the flexibility of the proposed algorithm to different numbers of available assets.