Towards Optimal Placement of Bio-Weapon Detectors

Authors

Chris Kiekintveld, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Octavio Lerma, The University of Texas at El Paso

Publication Date

12-2010

Comments

Technical Report: UTEP-CS-10-47a

Published in Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society NAFIPS'2011, El Paso, Texas, March 18-20, 2011.

Abstract

Biological weapons are difficult and expensive to detect. Within a limited budget, we can afford a limited number of bio-weapon detector stations. It is therefore important to find the optimal locations for such stations. A natural idea is to place more detectors in the areas with more population -- and fewer in desert areas, with fewer people. However, such a commonsense analysis does not tell us how many detectors to place where. To decide on the exact placement of bio-weapon detectors, we formulate the placement problem in precise terms, and come up with an (almost) explicit solution to the resulting optimization problem.