Enhanced gas source localization using distributed internet of things sensors and Bayesian inference

Identifying a gas source in turbulent environments presents a significant challenge for critical applications such as environmental monitoring and emergency response. This issue is addressed through an approach that combines distributed Internet of Things smart sensors with an algorithm based on Bayesian inference and Monte Carlo sampling techniques. Employing a probabilistic model of the environment, such an algorithm interprets the gas readings obtained from an array of static sensors to estimate the location of the source. The performance of our methodology is evaluated by its ability to estimate the source’s location within a given time frame. To test the robustness and practical applications of the methods under real-world conditions, we deployed an advanced distributed sensors network to gather water vapor data from a controlled source. The proposed methodology performs well when using both the synthetic data generated by the model of the environment and those measured in the real experiment, with the source localization error consistently lower than the distance between one sensor and the next in the array.