A hierarchical approach for planning a multisensor multizone search for a moving target

This paper deals with a well-known problem in the general area of search theory: optimize the search resources sharing so as to maximize the probability of detection of a (moving) target. However, the problem we consider here considerably differs from the classical one. First, there is a bilevel search planning and we have to consider jointly discrete and continuous optimization problems. To this perspective original methods are proposed within a common framework. Furthermore, this framework is sufficiently general and versatile so as to be easily and successfully extended to the difficult problem of the multizone multisensor search planning for a Markovian target.