Modeling considerations for wide area search munition effectiveness analysis

There are currently several wide area search munitions in the research and development phase within the Department of Defense. Progress on the individual technologies is promising, but there are insufficient analytical tools for evaluating the effectiveness of these concept munitions. This paper examines some of the modeling aspects of wide area search munitions with Autonomous Target Recognition (ATR) capability. The unique aspect of the munition problem is that a search agent is lost whenever an attack is executed. This significantly impacts the overall effectiveness in a multi-target/false target environment. ATR measures of performance are introduced, and described in terms of a confusion matrix for the sensor. The single munition/single target and general multi-munition/multi-target cases are discussed, and a simple application is used to validate the modeling constructs.