A risk-based approach to sensor resource management

We investigate the benefits of employing a suitable risk-based metric to determine in real-time the high level actions that an agile sensor should execute during a mission. Faced with a barrage of competing goals, a sensor resource manager must optimize system performance while simultaneously meeting all requirements. Numerous authors advocate the use of information-theoretic measures for driving sensor tasking algorithms, wherein the relative value of different sensing actions is calculated in terms of the expected gain in information. In this chapter, motivated by the sensor resource allocation problem in missile defense, we deviate from the information-based trend and propose an approach for determining sensor tasking decisions based on risk, or expected loss of defended assets. We present results of a missile defense simulation that illustrate the advantages of our risk-based objective function over its information-theoretic and rule-based counterparts.