This paper presents an approach to the design of environmental sensor networks (ESN) which aims at providing a robust, fit-for-purpose network with minimum redundancy. A set of near optimum ESN designs is sought using an evolutionary algorithm, which incorporates redundancy and robustness as fitness functions. This work can assist the decision-making process when determining the number of sensor nodes and how the nodes are going to be deployed in the region of interest.
Keywords: Sensor networks design; evolutionary algorithm; inverse distance weighting; multi-objective optimisation; spatial interpolation.