Fiscal Year	2013
Division	Graduate School of Operational & Information Sciences
Department	Operations Research
Investigator(s)	Stevens, Timothy S.
Sponsor	Space & Naval Warfare Systems Center-Pacific (Navy)
Summary	Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become the mainstay of modem day intelligence gathering. Adversaries of the United States are fully aware of this trend in technology and are developing weapons and training to counter these unmanned assets. In order to be effective, many of the counter-UAV weapons under development and testing require that a target lock be maintained on the UAV for some discrete amount of time. By randomizing the search pattern and limiting the time the UAV travels on any single flight leg to a magnitude less than the required weapon lock time we can minimize the vulnerability of these assets. To accomplish this randomization we employ a Levy distribution function to determine the length of each search leg, while heading changes are determined from a uniform distribution of tum angles. Further, a Bayesian probability update defined by sensor capability is incorporated into a looping search function. Should no detections occur within a specified amount of time, the searcher will travel directly to the area of highest target probability and recommence the search. The goal of this thesis is the optimization of this nondeterministic looped Levy search to provide the largest coverage ratio over a discretized search area while minimizing the searcher's probability of counterdetection.
Keywords
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