1. A method for determining optimal placement of a limited number of sensors in a specified area wherein optimal location of sensors provides equitable coverage levels to all locations within the area comprising the steps of: (a) generating a network representation of a specified area comprising nodes and directed links, where each node represents a sub-area that is to be monitored or a sub-area where a sensor may be placed or both and where each directed link represents surveillance relations among node-pairs, where a node-pair comprises a first node in a set of nodes where a sensor may be placed and an associated second node in a set of nodes that is to be monitored; (b) characterizing sensors in terms of their properties including probabilities of object detection and probabilities of false alarms, where the probabilities may be different for different node-pairs; (c) generating surveillance performance functions for the coverage level provided to each of the nodes that is to be monitored as a function of the location of sensors that monitor each of the nodes that is to be monitored; (d) generating an equitable sensor location model as a lexicographic maximin optimization model whose solution provides the lexicographically largest ordered vector whose elements are the coverage levels provided to the monitored nodes sorted in non-decreasing order, wherein the solution provides equitable coverage levels; and (e) generating the lexicographic maximin optimization model as a nonlinear integer optimization model whose solution provides equitable coverage levels to all nodes, where the solution is computed by existing optimization methods.