Missile Defense Scheduling / MD-Sched

For the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), Stottler Henke developed the artificial intelligence-based MD-Sched system to improve the ballistic missile defense system’s sensor and interceptor real-time scheduling capability. The potential shortness of time from launch to impact necessitates systems that can quickly schedule/reschedule to determine optimized sensing and intercept assignments without the need for costly decision-making timelines. MD-Sched capabilities include more efficient use of sensor and ground/sea/air/space based interceptor resources, with 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 builds on our previous successful interceptor scheduling work for the MDA, and scheduling the 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) vs. competing algorithms; and to achieve far smaller tracking error covariances with the same set of sensors than the existing SSN sensor-scheduling algorithms. This effort combines those techniques and others to create a single system that simultaneously optimizes the tasking of sensors and interceptors for a better solution than would be reached by optimizing them separately. The feasibility of our approach has been proven in a functional prototype tested in several realistic tactical scenarios.