Adaptive Task Reallocation for Airborne Sensor Sharing

Abstract

Airborne sensor platforms are becoming increasingly significant for both civilian and military operations, yet at present their sensors are typically idle for much of their flight time. Opportunistic sensor sharing, e.g., via the Mission-Driven Tasking of Information Producers (MTIP) can greatly improve sensor utilization, both decreasing the number of platforms needed to achieve a goal and increasing sensor efficacy. Dynamically changing environments, however, are likely to rapidly render any initial plan obsolete. In this paper, we address the challenge of adaptive reallocation of sensor sharing tasks, demonstrating how the adaptable sensor sharing of MTIP can provide significant performance improvements in a large-scale disaster response scenario, as well as identifying areas of inefficiency that are likely to benefit from further improvement.