Agenda

PhD Thesis Defence

• Thursday, 5 March 2015
• 12:00-11:30
• Aula Senaatszaal

Sensor management for surveillance and tracking. An operational perspective. March 5, 12.00 Aula, Senaatszaal. Promotor A. Yarovoy, co- promotor, H. Driessen

Defence, March 5, 12.00 Aula, Senaatszaal. Sensor management for surveillance and tracking. An operational perspective. In the literature, several approaches to sensor (including radar) management can be found. These can be roughly grouped into: a) rule-based or heuristics; b) task-based; c) information-driven; and d) risk/threat-based. These approaches are compared in this dissertation and it is found that there is not a single approach that is both Bayes-optimal and takes into account explicitly the user requirements in different operational contexts. In order to overcome the challenges with the existing approaches, this dissertation proposes managing the uncertainty in higher-level quantities (as per the JDL model) that are directly of interest to an operator and directly related to the operational goal of a radar system. The proposed approach is motivated by the threat assessment process, which is an integral part of defence missions. Accordingly, a prominent example of a commonly used higher-level quantity is the threat-level of a target. The key advantage of the proposed approach is that it results in Bayes-optimal sensor control that also takes into account the operational context in a model-based manner. In other words: a) a radar operator can select the aspects of threat that are relevant to the operational context at hand; and b) external information about the arrival of targets and other scenario parameters can be included when defining the models used in the signal processing algorithms, leading to context-adaptive sensor management.

Overview of PhD Thesis Defence