Dynamic asset allocation approaches for counter-piracy operations

Piracy on the high seas is a problem of world-wide concern. In response to this threat, the US Navy has developed a visualization tool known as the Pirate Attack Risk Surface (PARS) that integrates intelligence data, commercial shipping routes, and meteorological and oceanographic (METOC) information to predict regions where pirates may be present and where they may strike next. This paper proposes an algorithmic augmentation or add-on to PARS that allocates interdiction and surveillance assets so as to minimize the likelihood of a successful pirate attack over a fixed planning horizon. This augmentation, viewed as a tool for human planners, can be mapped closely to the decision support layer of the Battlespace on Demand (BonD) framework [32]. Our solution approach decomposes this NP-hard optimization problem into two sequential phases. In Phase I, we solve the problem of allocating only the interdiction assets, such that regions with high cumulative probability of attack over the planning horizon are maximally covered. In Phase II, we solve the surveillance problem, where the area not covered by interdiction assets is partitioned into non-overlapping search regions (e.g., rectangular boxes) and assigned to a set of surveillance assets to maximize the cumulative detection probability over the planning horizon. In order to overcome the curse of dimensionality associated with Dynamic Programming (DP), we propose a Gauss-Seidel algorithm coupled with a rollout strategy for the interdiction problem. For the surveillance problem, we propose a partitioning algorithm coupled with an asymmetric assignment algorithm for allocating assets to the partitioned regions. Once the surveillance assets are assigned to search regions, the search path for each asset is determined based on a specific search strategy. The proposed algorithms are illustrated using a hypothetical scenario for conducting counter-piracy operations in a given Area of Responsibility (AOR).