Minimizing supply airdrop collateral damage risk

Airdropped supplies are an essential part of military missions and humanitarian disaster support. This paper presents a methodology to determine the optimal location for making supply airdrops in order to minimize collateral damage from the drop while maintaining a high likelihood of successful recovery. Areas in the landing zone that are to be avoided are assigned weights and collateral damage risk is calculated as the weighted integral of the bivariate normal distribution over the undesirable areas in the scene. Optimum location of a drop consists of determining the angle of aircraft approach and (x, y) target. A series of non-linear optimization algorithms is presented along with their relative success in finding the optimal location in the airdrop problem. Specifically, two algorithms which leverage off of the bivariate normal probability distribution nature of airdrops are demonstrated to outperform other techniques in terms of speed and accuracy. The effects of changing airdrop parameters on expected collateral damage are discussed to lend advice to airdrop planners.

► We calculate collateral damage risk, a key indication of a successful supply drop.
► We estimate airdrop risk with simple-to-determine joint probability distributions.
► We locate airdrops through Pareto-optimal algorithms to a non-linear formulation.
► We present a series of studies which result in guidance to supply airdrop planners.
► Results have 20% lower collateral drop risk than ‘eyeball’ estimates from maps.