Military Operational Research: the Sensor Coverage Problem

Military Operations Research is a field that has been growing since the Second World War, and in particular in the last decades. Within this vast area, Air Defence, the protection of the air space against an airborne threat, has become a hot topic. ln order to successfully protect a given zone against an air attack, it is essential to possess an adequate air picture of this zone, that is produced by sensors (for example a radar). The area where there are no terrain obstacles between sensor and target is called the sensor coverage. This paper deals with the development of fast algorithms to point out candidate locations where one or more sensors can be placed in order to obtain the best coverage satisfying a given set of criteria