Probability-Of-Opportunity for Airborne Search Problems

Abstract : The concept of probability-of-opportunity grew out of work being done under the Air Force Research Laboratory's Next Generation Unmanned Aircraft System (AFRL/NGUAS) efforts. Specifically, AFRL was looking to better understand the relationships between sensor, sensor platform, and target characteristics in order to effectively search an area or route. Time-based simulation is quite costly and does not give immediate insight into what drives the search problem due to the lack of analytic relationships. The key to finding an efficient simulation technique was to break the search or find function of the system into two parts: 1) the probability that the sensor is looking at the right place at the right time (opportunity) and 2) given the former, the probability of the sensor in detecting the target. It was possible to develop an analytic approach to the opportunity problem using basic statistics.