Spatial and Temporal Modeling of IED Emplacements against Dismounted Patrols

Date

2014

Authors

Shankar, Arun

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Abstract

IED (Improvised Explosive Device) activity has been a concern for US and coalition troops in the Middle East for more than a decade. This dissertation describes a data collection effort in Afghanistan where IED event data and dismounted friendly force patrol movements were obtained. The IED event data is analyzed in time and space with no clear resemblance to a Poisson process in either domain. Consequently, a spatial clustering model is developed to model the collected data with high fidelity and few input parameters. Next, an IED emplacement model is developed to estimate emplacement times based on the interaction between the time and spatial dimensions of the friendly force data and the IED encounter data. Finally, simulated data is used to test the sensitivity of the model to a range of input parameters. From this we suggest improvements to the fidelity of the input data for the most accurate output results.

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Keywords

Operations research, Dismounted Patrols, Foot Patrols, IED, IED Clustering, IED Emplacements, Improvised Explosive Device

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