Battle of the Sensors

Following the cal for the Special JWRPM Issue on Drinking Water Distribution Systems Security, Avi Ostfeld sent the information regarding the “Battle of the Sensors”:

Dear Colleagues,

Following my announcement of yesterday on a Special Issue of the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management on Drinking Water Distribution Systems Security, here are a few more details on the “Battle of the Sensors” manuscript: the basic idea is to compare and discuss different published methodologies (i.e., published either in a journal, conference, or as a report so that an accessible reference can be quoted) for sensors/monitoring allocations using a well defined example (e.g., EPANET Example 3). Each of the participants will get the “rules” of the “Battle” (actually it’s not really a Battle; it’s more a comparison. The name “Battle” is induced from the Battle of the Networks paper of Walski et al., 1987) and will need to return (to me) with a short description of his recommendation as of where to put the sensors, the objective function he used, the detection likelihood of the sensors to reveal a contaminant intrusion, etc. I will receive all the reports and put them together: first each as a stand alone entity, and then as an ensemble looking at the differences between the methodologies, discuss their advantages and limitations, and suggest future directions. The next stage will be to send back the paper to all the participants for their approval and comments. Once I receive back all the comments I will submit the paper to the JWRPLM Chief Editor to perform the regular review process. I anticipate that the probability of such a paper to be rejected is very low. In addition, since we are looking at a single manuscript we are bounded by the 10000 equivalent word limitation of the journal so each of the participants will have a limited space. I hope this puts more light on the exercise which I anticipate to be very interesting. If any of you would like to participate, please let me know by June 7, 2005. Once have the list I will define exactly the “rules”, set the timeline, and distribute.

Thanks, Avi.