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

Abstract

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