USING SIMULATION TO MEASURE THE PERFORMANCE OF A SEARCH OPERATION FOR A MAN OVERBOARD

A man overboard is defined as a situation in which a person falls out at sea from a ship and is in need of rescue. In such cases, a quick and effective search and rescue (SAR) operation are crucial to increase the survival probability of the victim. If there is no visual contact with the victim, i.e. the exact time and location that the crew was overboard, and the drift direction and speed in the region are not certain, then the situation requires conducting a rescue maneuver in an uncertain area that is expanding over time. In this study, we compute the lower and upper bounds on the performance of a search operation in an expanding area for a man overboard situation. After deriving bounds on the cumulative detection probability of the victim, we test the validity of our analytic results by performing Monte Carlo simulations.