Soft sensors are an essential component of process systems engineering schemes. While soft sensor design research is important, investigation into the relationships between soft sensors and other areas of advanced monitoring and control is crucial as well. This dissertation presents two new techniques that enhance the performance of fault detection and sensor network design by integration with soft sensor technology. In addition, a chapter is devoted to the investigation of the proper implementation of one of the most often used soft sensors. The performance advantages of these techniques are illustrated with several cases studies. First, a new approach for fault detection which involves soft sensors for process monitoring is developed. The methodology presented here deals directly with the state estimates that need to be monitored. The advantage of such an approach is that the nonlinear effect of abnormal process conditions on the state variables can be directly observed. The presented technique involves a general framework for using soft sensor design and computation of the statistics that represent normal operating conditions. Second, a method for determining the optimal placement of multiple sensors for processes described by a class of nonlinear dynamic systems is described. This approach is based upon maximizing a criterion, i.e., the determinant, applied to the empirical observability gramian in order to optimize certain properties of the process state estimates. The determinant directly accounts for redundancy of information, however, the resulting optimization problem is nontrivial to solve as it is a mixed integer nonlinear programming problem. This paper also presents a decomposition of the optimization problem such that the formulated sensor placement problem can be solved quickly and accurately on a desktop PC. Many comparative studies, often based upon simulation results, between Extended Kalman filters (EKF) and other estimation methodologies such as Moving Horizon Estimation or Unscented Kalman Filter have been published over the last few years. However, the results returned by the EKF are affected by the algorithm used for its implementation and some implementations may lead to inaccurate results. In order to address this point, this work provides a comparison of several different algorithms for implementation.

Wireless Sensor Networks(WSNs) have gained a lot of attention because of their potential to immerse deeper into people' lives. The applications of WSNs range from small home environment networks to large habitat monitoring. These highly diverse scenarios impose different requirements on WSNs and lead to distinct design and implementation decisions. This thesis presents an optimization framework for WSN design which selects a proper set of protocols and number of nodes before a practical network deployment. A Genetic Algorithm(GA)-based Sensor Network Design Tool(SNDT) is proposed in this work for wireless sensor network design in terms of performance, considering application-specific requirements, deployment constrains and energy characteristics. SNDT relies on offine simulation analysis to help resolve design decisions. A GA is used as the optimization tool of the proposed system and an appropriate fitness function is derived to incorporate many aspects of network performance. The configuration attributes optimized by SNDT comprise the communication protocol selection and the number of nodes deployed in a fixed area. Three specific cases : a periodic-measuring application, an event detection type of application and a tracking-based application are considered to demonstrate and assess how the proposed framework performs. Considering the initial requirements of each case, the solutions provided by SNDT were proven to be favourable in terms of energy consumption, end-to-end delay and loss. The user-defined application requirements were successfully achieved.

In this thesis, there will be experimental wireless sensor network created. Simple mo- nitoring application will be running on this network and storing data in database. For easier maintaining of network, there will be prototype system created, which will allow remote firmware upload to network nodes. This system will use Bootloader application from Atmel company combined with Serial to Ethernet converter. This system will al- lows mass upload of firmware to nodes from any place in the world with Internet access. Information about network will be stored in database which will include table for nodes and connections where its possible to see link quality for each link in the network.