Optimizing Systemic Redundancy of Traffic Sensor Networks While Maintaining Resilience: New Evidence From Using Graph Learning

The optimization of systemic redundancy by minimizing the sensor quantity can improve the efficiency of sensor networks and save costs. However, from the perspective of risk management, this redundancy reduction can also bring a significant loss in the overall network resilience because the less the systemic redundancy is, the fewer backup components in the network when shocks hit and, therefore, the less overall resilience. In this article, we investigate this intractable dilemma and attempt to pinpoint the tradeoff point for a city-scale automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) system in Cambridge, U.K. By developing a two-stage graph deep learning model, we first optimize the layout of the ANPR system to reduce redundancy and find its efficiency profile. Next, we study what effects this redundancy reduction can bring to the overall resilience, as the overall observability drops with the reduction in the number of sensors and find an optimal balance. The results show that our approach can effectively optimize the system's redundancy by using only 47% of the original sensors to reconstruct the full picture with a mean absolute error of only 11.18 and a root mean square error of 19.49; most importantly, the overall system resilience is maintained at 70% in the meantime. This article provides an alternative perspective for dealing with the well-known “efficiency-resilience” dilemma and offers new evidence to enable better decision and policy making for city managers and planners in local authorities.