Impact of Imprecise Dating of Measurements for Bulk Material Flow Network Monitoring

Abstract : This paper discusses the negative impact of errors in the time datation of data as they are gathered accross a distributed newtork of sensors to be treated by a centralized monitoring algorithm. An example of flow monitoring serves as basis for the analysis. Using a simple probability model, we establish the variance of an estimator serving for loss detection and show how it varies with the time uncertainty. A mitigating solution is proposed. Further extensions are discussed.