Decentralized placement of heterogeneous nodes

We present a node placement algorithm for planning the deployment of a heterogeneous, underwater sensor network. Typical node placement algorithms do not account for heterogeneous node types and consequently, do not always provide accurate estimates for the total probability of success for the overall mission objective. In our approach, we derive an objective function that couples the probability of success for all node types to be used by a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) solver for optimal placement. To reduce the computational intensity associated with the MILP-based approach, we provide an algorithm that converts the original optimization problem into several smaller optimization problems. We also describe the accompanying MILP framework that we have developed to create and maintain MILP problems.