Territorial scale modeling for best value sensor or comm siting

Many of the current efforts in the sphere of homeland security, and national defense involve the use of fixed sites to provide sensor coverage, RF communications coverage, or RF relay coverage for terrestrial areas and/or airspace volumes. For terrestrial infrastructure, it is more cost effective to utilize existing towers/buildings for sensor/antenna sites, rather than to build new ones. If a mission system integrator (MSI) is teamed with one or more large tower providers or telecommunications companies, then often the MSI will have many more potential sites to choose from than the absolute number of sites required for coverage. Raytheon has extended the automated design for affordability and planning toolkit (ADAPTtrade) to this class of problem. The ADAPTtrade approach is based on a cost as an independent variable (CAIV) analysis, leverages automatic and integrated execution of consituent models, applies genetic optimization algorithms, and for problems with tens of thousands of candidate sites, can be shown to converge at a significantly lower cost solution than may be arrived at by hand optimization, or other automated optimization techniques.