Ocean coverage management process for gliders operations

Undersea gliders have the capability of travelling further than conventional propelled autonomous vehicles. Their long endurance enables marine scientists to perform in situ observations in a sustainable way, which thus far has only been possible with moorings and surface vessels. In terms of functionality undersea gliders can meet the desired observation requirement. However, previous reliability analyses have shown that, from the user perspective, the undersea glider mean time between failures is lower than the maximum vehicle endurance. As a result an ocean coverage process for supporting decision making concerning undersea glider deployments is needed in order to ensure that the target ocean coverage is met. This paper proposes a coverage management process tailored to undersea glider operation (CMP-glider). The process guides the undersea glider user through a sequence of steps in which the number of undersea gliders, their mission lengths and number of missions are selected for a given ocean coverage target. We provide a case study showing the application of the proposed process.