Optimal Placement of Water Quality Monitoring Stations in Sewer Systems: An Information Theory Approach

A core problem associated with the water quality monitoring in the sewer system is the optimal placement of a limited number of monitoring sites. A methodology is provided for optimally design water quality monitoring stations in sewer networks. The methodology is based on information theory, formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem and solved using NSGA-II. Computer code is written to estimate two entropy quantities, namely Joint Entropy, a measure of information content, and Total Correlation, a measure of redundancy, which are maximized and minimized, respectively. The test on a real sewer network suggests the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.