Sensor Platform Management Strategies in a Multi-Threat Environment

The objective of a Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) is to defend the United States, friends and allies, and deployed forces from ballistic missile attack. While effectively intercepting the threat missiles is the ultimate measure of a successful system, the ability to accurately track incoming threats is a key prerequisite. In a BMDS, missile-tracking is the activity of coordinating and managing multiple sensor and computing resources to detect and track threat missiles. Development of specialized and highly capable sensor, computing, and network resources creates a multitude of functional allocation possibilities that promise to increase the effectiveness of the missile-tracking task. This paper presents a taxonomy for the description of missile-tracking architectures and an enterprise-level Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation framework for their evaluation. We find that highly centralized architectures outperform decentralized ones. The dimension of centralization, however, plays an important role in the performance of an architecture; centralized situational awareness coupled with decentralized sensor tasking can still provide quality solutions while presenting the possibility for reduced communication requirements.