Missile Defense Scheduling / MD-Sched

The ultimate goal of this effort was to improve the ballistic missile defense system’s sensor and interceptor real-time scheduling capability. These improvements include more efficient use of sensor and interceptor resources, increased kill probabilities, reduced probability of leakage, improved tracking accuracy, the ability to efficiently handle a large number of targets and resources, and faster scheduling and rescheduling. This effort built on our previous successful interceptor scheduling work for the MDA and scheduling the Air Force’s Space Surveillance Network (SSN). Those efforts demonstrated our ability to more optimally schedule ballistic missile intercept, using fewer interceptors to achieve equal or reduced Total Residual Leakage (TRL) than competing algorithms; and to achieve far smaller tracking error covariances with the same set of sensors than the current SSN sensor-scheduling algorithms. This effort combined those techniques and others to create a single system that simultaneously optimized the tasking of sensors and interceptors for a better solution than would be reached by optimizing them separately. The feasibility of our approach was proven by developing a prototype and testing in several realistic tactical scenarios.