A cyber physical networking system for monitoring and cleaning up blue-green algae blooms with agile sensor and actuator control mechanism on Lake Tai

Nowadays, the harmful blue-green algae blooms on lakes threaten the daily life of millions of people in China. We designed and developed a cyber physical networking system on Lake Tai for the monitoring and cleanup of the water blooms which is at work in Wuxi City, Jiangsu Province. We designed the sensor device and algorithm to monitor the order of severity of algae bloom. A GIS-based management website is built for the end user to monitor the whole system. In this paper, we focus on the agile sensor and actuator control (ASAC) mechanism to dispatch salvaging boats. The location area and the order of severity of a water bloom change rapidly with the climatic, the terrain and the sewage disposal system. The location and the capacity of salvaging boat are also in changing when the system is running. ASAC is designed to generate optimal dispatch plan in the changing environment. This mechanism also balances workloads among the boats and among the algae factories to achieve an overall high working efficiency. Through the tests in the real system, ASAC largely saved human resource and increased the work efficiency in the cleaning up process.