Team optimization of cooperating systems: application to maximal area coverage

The composite effort of the system team, rather, is significantly more important than a single player´s individual performance. We consider the case wherein each player´s performance is tuned to result in maximal team performance for the specific case of maximal area coverage (MAC). The approach is first illustrated through solution of MAC by a fixed number of deformable shapes. An application to sonar is then presented. Here, sonar control parameters determine a range-depth area of coverage. The coverage is also affected by known but uncontrollable environmental parameters. The problem is to determine K sets of sonar ping parameters that result in MAC. The forward problem of determining coverage given control and environmental parameters is computationally intensive. To facilitate real time cooperative optimization among a number of such systems, the sonar input-output is captured in a feedforward layered perceptron neural network