The eye and the fist: Optimizing search and interdiction

Abstract

Abstract. Interdiction operations involving search, identification, and interception of suspected objects are of great interest and high operational importance to military and naval forces as well as nation's coast guards and border patrols. The interdiction scenario discussed in this paper includes an area of interest with multiple neutral and hostile objects moving through this area, and an interdiction force, consisting of an airborne sensor and an intercepting surface vessel or ground vehicle, whose objectives are to search, identify, track, and intercept hostile objects within a given time frame. The main contributions of this paper are addressing both airborne sensor and surface vessel simultaneously, developing a stochastic dynamic-programming model for optimizing their employment, and deriving operational insight. In addition, the search and identification process of the airborne sensor addresses both physical (appearance) and behavioral (movement pattern) signatures of a potentially hostile object. As the model is computationally intractable for real-world scenarios, we propose a simple heuristic policy, which is shown, using a bounding technique, to be quite effective. Based on a numerical case study of maritime interdiction operations, which includes several representative scenarios, we show that the expected number of intercepted hostile objects, following the heuristic decision policy, is at least 60% of the number of hostile objects intercepted following an optimal decision policy.

A multi-criteria Police Districting Problem for the efficient and effective design of patrol sector

“…By including these effects in an optimization problem it would be possible to formulate a model for the design of patrol configurations that result in a reduction of the future level of criminality. The model would be similar in nature to theoretical games (Hohzaki and Maehara, 2010) and to fortification/interdiction problems used to hedge against intentional attacks (Scaparra and Church, 2008;Kress et al, 2012;Zoroa et al, 2012) and natural disasters (Liberatore et al, 2012).…”

To catch an intruder: Part A—uncluttered scenario

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On Creativity: A Case Study of Military Innovation

“…a case study using historical maintenance data (e.g., failure rates) of a particular type of pump to better understand the wider field of age-replacement policies (Gaver, Jacobs, & Dudenhoeffer, 1997), and a case study using algorithms from search theory to develop a model of the deployment of assets during Maritime Interdiction Operations (Kress, Royset, & Rozen, 2012). Historical, numerical data and established algorithms are rare in the field of creativity research.…”