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In the design of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), it is important to reduce energy consumption and extend the service life of the sensors. Selecting one of the minimum sensor combinations (MSCs) that can monitor all areas, while the other MSCs are asleep, can effectively extend the lifetime of WSNs. This paper proposes two algorithms based on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) for extracting some MSCs, to minimize the energy consumption and meet the coverage requirement. These two methods firstly extract the concept lattice from a monitor-areas context, and then it is simple to extract sensor nodes monitoring the overlapping area from the concept lattice. The algorithms consist of three steps as follows: the first step is to transform sensors and monitoring areas into a context, the second is to extract the concept lattice and implications among areas, and the third is to extract some different MSCs that can monitor all areas. Thus, some strategies are designed to awaken different MSCs to achieve the purpose of reducing energy consumption. Experimental results show that these methods have played a positive effect on extracting different MSCs and extending the lifetime of sensor networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]