Opportunistic sensor resource management for extended regions

We address the problem and challenge of managing multi-asset, heterogeneous sensor arrays in extended operating conditions. Such are conditions in which the performance of the fusion system that sensor arrays support is degraded due to environmental variabilities, geographical obscuration, and resource saturation, among many other possible causes. Recently in this post 911 era, these extended conditions have become increasingly relevant with the preponderance of non-conventional war situations around the globe. We discuss our approach to the aforementioned challenge laid out and implemented in our research program called OSRM (Opportunistic Sensor Resource Management). We present our hierarchical, dynamic optimal control methods that respond to the highly dynamic nature of extended conditions, and further detail our lattice-based, value-driven approach of utilizing the sensor arrays. We will in particular discuss the idea of mission lattice, a data structure which constructs, prioritizes, and manages the whole spectrum of tasks that sensor arrays need to satisfy, and a novel construction, using ideas from finance, of a value function which assigns relative importance to each task. Finally, we describe our system and test bed architecture that integrates ground target tracker, target motion generator, sensor report generator, sensor resource manager, a platform route generator, and automated task generator and report the results of experiments that verify the effectiveness of our approach.