A method for selecting a subset of at least one traffic sensor includes modeling multiple sensor types to generate at least one sensor model, creating a sample space of at least one sensor combination of multiple sensors, modeling traffic movement of a region, running a traffic simulation based on the at least one sensor model, the sample space of at least one sensor combination and traffic movement of the region, wherein the traffic simulation generates multiple candidate sets of sensors, and selecting a subset of the multiple sensors based on the multiple candidate sets of sensors.