Graduation Year

2010

Document Type

Thesis

Degree

M.S.E.M.

Degree Granting Department

Industrial and Management Systems Engineering

Major Professor

Ali Yalcin, Ph.D.

Committee Member

David Jeffcoat, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Bo Zeng, Ph.D.

Keywords

Petri Net, cueing, simulation, target detection, UAVs

Abstract

The analysis of performance gains arising from cueing in cooperative search

systems with autonomous vehicles has been studied using Continuous Time Markov

Chains; where the search time distributions are assumed to follow the exponential

distributions. This work proposes the use of Petri Nets to model and analyze these

systems. The Petri Net model considers two types of autonomous vehicles: a search-only

vehicle and n search-engage vehicles. Specific performance metrics are defined to

measure system’s performance. Through simulation, it is shown that the search time with

stationary targets and cues that provide exact target location follows a triangular

distribution. A methodology for approximating general distributions and incorporating

them into the Petri Net model for performance analysis is presented.

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