Research Summaries

Back Optimization of Sensor Operation for Search, Surveillance, and Rapid Accurate Decision Making in Maritime, Littoral, and Urban Environments

Fiscal Year 2018
Division Graduate School of Operational & Information Sciences
Department Operations Research
Investigator(s) Kress, Moshe
Szechtman, Roberto
Sponsor Office of Naval Research (Navy)
Summary We propose to develop models and algorithms to support surveillance and interdiction in naval and homeland security applications. The research will comprise three problems.
The first problem focuses on searching for a target (e.g., terrorist, adversary's ship), which moves among several given locations. The objective here is to study the pattern of this movement and thus infer the behavior and intentions of the target. In this setting the problem is how to dynamically employ a suite of sensors over time such that the movement pattern can be identified as fast as possible.
The second problem addresses a related situation where a searcher tries to detect targets that appear over a certain area according to a Poisson process. The search space is partitioned into area-cells, and targets not detected in a certain time period may disappear (renege). The problem for the searcher is to come up with a dynamic search policy that balances learning the intensity of arrivals into each area-cell, with exploiting the accumulated knowledge to-date in order to focus on the cells that appear most promising to have valid targets.
While the first two problems deal with operations, the third problem focuses on the design of optimal payload(s) for a future Navy unmanned system – the TERN – which is capable of performing ISR, communication, defense against small boat attacks, and ASW missions
Keywords Surveillance multi-armed bandit optimal payload
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal