Undersea Sensor Network Performance Modeling and Cost Tool

Undersea acoustic surveillance arrays are the Navy’s first line of defense in monitoring critical locations and protecting them from increasingly sophisticated adversary submarine threats. The existing methods used to design and plan seafloor sensor networks are a labor-heavy, lengthy and highly iterative process that takes up to several weeks. The Makai Ocean Engineering team (Makai) proposes to develop a software tool to model a sensor network’s performance and costs based on sensor location and array configuration, sensor and connector types, and the offshore bathymetric and oceanographic environment. The proposed software, which we are calling MakaiPlan-Pd+, will leverage decades of development of the cable industry’s leading submarine installation software, MakaiPlan, and the team’s decades of experience with cost-estimation, acoustic probability of detection modeling, and execution of a wide range of offshore cable installations. MakaiPlan-Pd+ will use the core MakaiPlan GIS interface and tools, with the additional libraries and functions required to accurately predict the costs and probability of detection performance of the array systems in real-time. This tool will not only increase the effectiveness of sensor arrays, but decrease the time and cost to commissioning of these systems.