DBO-Based Mobile Agent Crowd Sensing for Pollution Source Localization

Abstract Pollution source localization is a critical concern in various monitoring applications. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent crowd sensing method for pollution source localization using simplified dung beetle optimizer (DBO). The DBO controller guides the agent swarm to move towards the pollution source in the manner of aggregation, meanwhile, prevents the occurrence of collisions between agents or between agents and obstacles during movement. Besides, the controller incorporates the remaining to ensure balanced energy cost among mobile agents. Furthermore, a collaborative sensing model based on link quality is specially designed to maintain reliable connectivity between mobile agents during pollution source localization. Experiment results demonstrate our method enables precise localization of the pollution source, while having superiority in energy efficiency, collision avoidance and multi-agent connectivity.