Search research

摘要

How does one best search for non-replenishable targets at unknown positions? An optimized search strategy could be applied to situations as diverse as animal foraging and time-sensitive rescue missions. Operations research - the field that uses mathematical methods to optimize complex real-world structures and processes - grew out of the analysis of military problems during the Second World War. One such question was the optimization problem 'How to hunt a submarine'1, the analysis of which had to take several factors into account. For instance, a figure-of-eight search pattern of an aircraft scouring littoral waters would be different from the pattern for a search of deep-ocean waters. The problem was also complicated by the fact that a negative search might mean only that a submarine was submerged, not that it was absent.