Evolutionary techniques for sensor networks energy optimization in marine environmental monitoring

Abstract

The sustainable management of coastal and offshore ecosystems, such as for example coral reef environments, requires the collection of accurate data across various temporal and spatial scales. Accordingly, monitoring systems are seen as central tools for ecosystem-based environmental management, helping on one hand to accurately describe the water column and substrate biophysical properties, and on the other hand to correctly steer sustainability policies by providing timely and useful information to decision-makers. A robust and intelligent sensor network that can adjust and be adapted to different and changing environmental or management demands would revolutionize our capacity to wove accurately model, predict, and manage human impacts on our coastal, marine, and other similar environments. In this paper advanced evolutionary techniques are applied to optimize the design of an innovative energy harvesting device for marine applications. The authors implement an enhanced technique in order to exploit in the most effective way the uniqueness and peculiarities of two classical optimization approaches, Particle Swarm Optimization and Genetic Algorithms. Here, this hybrid procedure is applied to a power buoy designed for marine environmental monitoring applications in order to optimize the recovered energy from sea-wave, by selecting the optimal device configuration.

Optimization of an energy harvesting buoy for coral reef monitoring

“…In fact, although these resources usually present discontinuous phenomena with not very dense energy content [2], they are among the most promising renewable energy sources for application both in Smart Cities [3] and MREIs [4]. With respect to wind and photovoltaic, the energy associated to sea waves is more concentrated and consistent [5], since it is related to the mechanical motion of a fluid significantly denser than air and it is caused by a phenomenon more intense than solar radiation.…”