Optimal deployment of indoor sensors for a real-time location tracking system

A real-time location tracking system (RTLTS) for material flow and workers is important for many manufacturing and service facilities. In this work, a novel framework is proposed to enable the optimal deployment of access points (APs) for indoor RTLTS. To this end, two different wireless sensor networks of radio frequency identification (RFID) and ultra-wideband (UWB) are considered for zone detection and localization, respectively. In the proposed framework, both area and tag covering problems are addressed to find the optimal number and placement of APs for RFID and UWB based RTLTS. An algorithm is developed utilizing the geometrical approach to solve the area coverage problem. To address the tag covering problem, an optimization model is developed, which is solved by a greedy algorithm proposed in this work. Experimental results show convergence of the proposed optimization algorithm. Moreover, a generalized guideline is proposed to find the optimal number of APs depending on the RTLTS application scenario.