A new spatiotemporal virtual plane to evaluate the performance of the border coverage scenarios

In this paper, a new approach for evaluating the performance of a coverage scenario in a border patrolling mission is presented. In these kinds of missions, continuous coverage of the entire surface over time, which maximizes the probability of detecting the intruders during crossing the border region, has great importance. Continuous and complete coverage of a border defines as “the maximum time distance between two successive visits from a specific point while it is less than a predefined threshold”. This threshold is defined due to the maximum speed of the intruders and period of flight scenario for all the points along the border during this period. The proposed approach by using a graphical virtual plane provides the opportunity of evaluation of the performance of the coverage scenarios and the probability of detecting passing intruders in a specific time period. This virtual plane represents spatial and temporal coverage of the border simultaneously, hence it is called spatiotemporal virtual plane. Relative movement of the UAV(s) and intruders, and assigning a metric to the probability of intruders detection are the main problems in the evaluation of the coverage scenario. The proposed virtual plane determines the effect of this relative movement on the performance of the coverage and illustrates this spatiotemporal concept in a graphical manner. By using this graphical representation, the capability of a scenario can be extracted and used in order to maximize the efficiency of the conceptual design phase. Also, the different coverage scenarios and paths can be compared via this tool. The verification of the proposed approach is done by comparing the probability of detection of the intruders which is computed by this approach and Monte-Carlo simulation.