Modeling and Analysis of Measurement Uncertainty for Distributed Measurement System

The distributed measurement system (DMS) is a representative measurement system with multiple transmitters. One of essential indexes used to evaluate the overall performance of DMS is measurement uncertainty. In this paper, a model of measurement uncertainty for DMS is derived explicitly, and the anisotropy and inhomogeneity of measurement uncertainty along different axes are analyzed in detail. The effect of various layouts of transmitters on measurement uncertainty is also discussed by carrying out simulation experiment and validation experiment. The experimental results show that for the layout of transmitters, the deployment in type of ‘4-trapezoid’ is superior to that in type of ‘2-line’, ‘3-line’, ‘3-triangle’, ‘4-squre’, and ‘4-line’, especially in terms of measurement uncertainty.