Sensor Resource Management

The task of managing employment planning and real time tasking of sensor resources in complex ballistic missile defense target environments demands innovative techniques. As the complexity of a threat scene grows, the resources required to survey the situation grow at an even faster rate. Sensor resource limitations require intelligent and deliberate management in a multi-raid or multi-target environment. One approach taken to solve this dilemma is to assign simple rules and priorities to various types of tasks to the sensors, but these approaches are often limited in applicability and suffer under varied conditions outside of the original, narrow design space. The innovative approach in this proposal relies on a fundamentally different approach to solving this problem. By applying a series of cost functions that address the key system performance drivers and utilize knowledge of the threat phenomenology, the costs and benefits of many potential sensor task assignment sets can be examined. From this analysis, a set of possible assignments can be found and evaluated, thus providing a multi-hypothesis solution forward in time. It is the intent in Phase I to prove this concept is feasible, technically sound, and performs well under highly complex threat scenes.