Optimal employment of space surveillance resources for maritime target tracking and re-acquisition

Maximal exploitation of space-based surveillance resources is unique due to the nature of the platforms, their sensors and intermittent communications links to ground stations for target information processing and sensor tasking. An optimal formulation of the problem of integrating a range of disparate surveillance sensor systems based on Bayesian inference and entropy measures of eflectiveness for dealing with decision making under information uncertainty forms the basis for this paper. Here a general methodology is proposed for planning, tasking and control of surveillance assets by formulating surveillance as a stochastic optimal control problem, which has as its objective the minimisation of uncertainty associated with the information collected, subject to surveillance system time and resource constraints, and sensor imperfections. The approach presented provides a rational basis for surveillance asset optimisation that sets information as the objective, incorporates platform anamics and constraints, semor capabilities, stochastic eflects and control variables within a single formulation.