Computational expense associated with documented methods for the optimal placement of contaminant sensors to provide maximum protection for a water distribution system (WDS) under a terrorist attack has prevented the emergence of a definitive method for sensor placement. We submit a sensor placement method that assigns "nodal importance values" in order for an optimization algorithm to efficiently maximize WDS protection as a function of detection time, contaminated water volume, and detection likelihood while obeying sensor availability constraints, accounting for terrorist attack uncertainties, and minimizing computational expense. The importance of a node is a function of contaminant presence, potential contaminated water volume, and time elapsed after a contamination event. More-important nodes are assigned to a subset, and an optimization algorithm (a simple genetic algorithm in our case) searches the subset to find the sensor node combination of best protection performance. Results from testing our method on a WDS of complex behavior indicate that this method yields desirable protection performance in a very computationally efficient manner and that protection performance resulting from this method is sensitive to the size of the subset chosen.
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