A Unified Approach to Optimally Solving Sensor Scheduling and Sensor Selection Problems in Kalman Filtering

Abstract: We consider a general form of the sensor scheduling problem for state estimation of linear dynamical systems, which involves selecting sensors that minimize the trace of the Kalman filter error covariance (weighted by a positive semidefinite matrix) subject to polyhedral constraints on the selected sensors. This general form captures several well-studied problems including sensor placement, sensor scheduling with budget constraints, and Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control and sensing co-design. We present a mixed integer optimization approach that is derived by exploiting the optimality of the Kalman filter. While existing work has focused on approximate methods to specific problem variants, our work provides a unified approach to computing optimal solutions to the general version of sensor scheduling. In simulation, we show this approach finds optimal solutions for systems with 30 to 50 states in seconds.