An optimization approach to the design of outdoor thermal fire detection systems

With the recent growing usage of bio-fuels the need for fire detection in outdoor bio-fuel depots has increased, and several fire detection technologies for this purpose have been proposed. We consider the use of thermal cameras and present the problem of designing the placement of such cameras. Bio-fuel depots are often large and it might be prohibitively expensive to surveil the complete areas of interest, and it is therefore required to generate compromise solutions between area coverage and cost, to be presented to a customer. We give a bi-objective mathematical optimization formulation of the problem and fast heuristics that find compromise solutions, and present results from calculating camera placements for several real-world bio-fuel depots. Our approach has been implemented in a decision support software, which is currently in use.