Mission-Driven sensor management analysis, design, implementation and simulation

The management of sensors onboard of the vessels operated by the Royal Netherlands Navy is becoming increasingly knowledge intensive due to the fact that these vessels are equipped with state-of-the-art sensor systems that provide more functionality and more accurate information at the cost of more complex control mechanisms and due to the shift of operational areas from the fairly stable environment of the Atlantic Ocean into littoral waters with often dense civil traffic and rapidly changing geographical and meteorological conditions. The shrinking defence budgets on the other hand drive a demand for crew reduction, shorter education times and less training opportunities thus reducing the synergy created within teams of operators and the knowledge and experience of individual operators. This perception led to the following problem definition: management of a set of complex sensor systems under often rapidly changing environmental, operational conditions and temporal constraints requires more skills and knowledge than is currently available. Within the research generic sensor management principles were formulated that were used to construct a three-stage sensor manager. Furthermore a new, object-oriented Command and Control (C2) concept was developed that provides the sensor manager with the required information. Utilising these results, a basic C2 system with integrated sensor manager was designed, that was tested in a simulated maritime scenario by deploying a model of a Multi-Function Radar. The execution of this scenario showed that it was possible to deploy the multi-function radar completely autonomously by utilising prior information and from this result it can be deduced that mission-driven, autonomous sensor management is feasible. The prototype also provides the possibility to integrate radar performance prediction tools that predicts the sensor performance for the prevailing meteorological and environmental conditions. The generic sensor management principles that were postulated do not restrict the sensor suite to being located at a single platform and therefore a sensor manager that is developed along these principles is theoretically capable of handling a suite of distributed sensors. The research showed that the management principles could also be used to manage other resources and the sensor manager may well be expanded into a resource manager.Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc

Automatic sensor management: Challenges and solutions

Due to technical advances and the changing political environment sensor management has become increasingly knowledge intensive. Aboard navy ships however, we see a decrease of available knowledge, both quantitative and qualitative. This growing discrepancy drives the need for automation of sensor management. Since the goal of sensor deployment is to have a complete and accurate operational picture relative to the mission we propose a three-stage sensor manager, where sensor task requests are generated based on the uncertainty in the (expected) objects’ attributes. These tasks are assigned to available and suited sensors, which in turn are fine-tuned for the task at hand. When trying to reduce the uncertainty in the classification solution one must first define how the classification process actually works. We discuss why the classification process needs to be automated as well and show how such classification algorithms will most likely work in the future.Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc