Impact of imprecise dating of measurements for bulk material flow network monitoring

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.