Trip-based mobile sensor deployment for drive-by sensing with bus fleets

Drive-by sensing (i.e. vehicle-based mobile sensing) is an emerging data collection paradigm that leverages vehicle mobilities to scan a city at low costs. It represents a positive social externality of urban transport activities. Bus transit systems are widely considered in drive-by sensing due to extensive spatial coverage, reliable operations, and low maintenance costs. It is critical for the underlying monitoring scenario (e.g. air quality, traffic state, and road roughness) to assign a limited number of sensors to a bus fleet to ensure their optimal spatial-temporal distribution. In this paper we present a trip-based sensor deployment problem, which explicitly considers timetabled trips that must be executed by the fleet while a portion of them perform sensing tasks. To address the computational challenge in large-scale instances, we design a multi-stage solution framework that decouples the spatial-temporal structures of the sensing task through line pre-selection and bi-level optimization. As a result, the computational complexity is reduced to be sub-linear w.r.t. the number of lines, rather than combinatorial w.r.t. the number of buses in existing vehicle-based approaches. A real-world case study covering 400 km2 in central Chengdu demonstrates the effectiveness of the model in solving large-scale problems. It is found that coordinating bus scheduling and sensing tasks can substantially increase the spatial-temporal sensing coverage. We also provide a few model extensions and recommendation for practice regarding the application of this method.