EVALUATION OF COURSES OF ACTION SIMULATION TOOL

Maritime counter-drug operations and related activities constitute a high-priority national security mission because drug-trafficking involves criminals, a source of financing for illicit activities, and penetration of the U.S. border. Currently, Joint Interagency Task Force South is successful in executing this mission. Due to the wide area of coverage by a limited number of assets, there is a need for integration of intelligence, meteorology and oceanography information, as well as effective surveillance to detect and identify drug traffickers in order to gain situational awareness and effectively allocate resources for maritime operations. As a result, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory is developing a system for dynamic resource management in counter-smuggling operations, named the Courses of Action Simulation Tool (COAST). This analysis assesses how well the present modeling framework and the associated decision support tool perform by developing an alternative optimization model, implemented in Pyomo, and comparing its recommendation to those of the existing tool. We present a mixed-integer linear program and assess that the results from COAST are within an average of 22% and 16% of our optimal solution of expected number of smugglers detected in single- and two-target scenarios, respectively.

Department dc:contributor.department

Operations Research (OR)

Grantor dc:publisher

Monterey, CA; Naval Postgraduate School

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Riley, Kevin F.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Royset, Johannes O.

Statement dc:rights

• This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10945/72250

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:calhoun.nps.edu:10945/72250