Sensor Resource Management

The expansion in the Missile Defense Agency"s mission to include emphasis on theater and regional missile defense necessitates the development of innovative concepts and techniques for employment planning and real time tasking of a variety of distributed sensor resources. Needed are algorithms in a number of closely coupled areas including: fusion of information from disparate and possibly heterogeneous sources, cooperative assignment/tasking/scheduling of sensors for optimally achieving overall mission objectives, and communication between the sensors. Such cooperative use of multiple sensory sources requires development of algorithmic strategies to optimally manage resources to cover multiple threat complexes in multi-raid scenes subject to sensors"constraints in order to provide optimal quality of service, and increase likelihood of neutralizing missile threats. In response to this need, the Edaptive Computing team proposes STORM (Sensor Tasking for Optimized Resource Management), a research and development effort that will result in a unique and commercially viable innovation to optimizing resource management for ballistic missile defense. Specifically, we will be developing and demonstrating unique algorithms within the context of a multi-raid, multi-target scenario, which will provide real-time adaptive allocation strategies for a large number of distributed and heterogeneous sensors.