Fault-tolerant tasking and guidance of an airborne location sensor network

This paper is concerned with tasking and guidance of networked airborne sensors to achieve fault-tolerant sensing. The sensors are coordinated to locate hostile transmitters by intercepting and processing their signals. Faults occur when some sensor-carrying vehicles engaged in target location missions are lost. Faults effectively change the network architecture and therefore degrade the network performance. The first objective of the paper is to optimally allocate a finite number of sensors to targets to maximize the network life and availability. To that end allocation policies are solved from relevant Markov decision problems. The sensors allocated to a target must continue to adjust their trajectories until the estimate of the target location reaches a prescribed accuracy. The second objective of the paper is to establish a criterion for vehicle guidance for which fault-tolerant sensing is achieved by incorporating the knowledge of vehicle loss probability, and by allowing network reconfiguration in the event of loss of vehicles. Superior sensing performance in terms of location accuracy is demonstrated under the established criterion.