Active Management of Multiple Sensors & Platforms for Synchronized ISR

Toyon Research Corporation proposes to develop algorithms for the active management of multiple sensors executing collection plans developed in advance of a mission. Events during the course of the mission can cause some of the sensors to be unable toperform their scheduled tasks on time. For sensor schedules requiring the synchronization of multiple sensors, these individual failures can lead to a domino effect that renders the rest of the schedule unusable. We plan to adapt work that we have done onthe dynamic construction of sensor schedules to the problem of schedule perturbation management. Dynamically-created candidate strategies to deal with perturbations will be evaluated by their ability to reduce the information-theoretic entropy of a targetdatabase. Schedule de-synchronization will be studied to identify the factors responsible and determine the magnitude of the deviations. Toyon will demonstrate how active sensor management can salvage most of the original plan using our software testbed,SLAMEMT. If we are selected to continue development of the concept in Phase II, we would work to extend our algorithm to deal with a wide variety of perturbing circumstances and perform system demonstrations to evaluate the performance of the resultingalgorithm. Development of algorithms for the intelligent management of multiple sensors would result in considerably more useful information to warfighters for developing battlefield awareness. The ability to minimize disruption to preplanned sensorschedules due to perturbations would greatly broaden the range of scenarios for which highly optimized schedules constructed in advance of a mission could be applied.