The Process of Search Planning: Current Approaches and Continuing Problems
Lawrence D. Stone, Daniel H. Wagner · 2016
AS ORIGINALLY CONCEIVED, operations research sought to apply scientific principles to operational problems. In the United States, the first application of operations research was to naval operations during World War II. The report by Morse and Kimball [1946] documents many of the techniques developed by the U.S. Navy's operations research group during World War II. The analysis of search operations was the subject of an intensive effort by this group and resulted in a separate publication, and Screening, by B. 0. Koopman [1946], who wrote an updated and expanded version of this report (Koopman [1980]). Search operations are still a large part of naval operations. Maritime search and rescue operations are a major responsibility of the U.S. Coast Guard. The U.S. Air Force has responsibility for coordinating land search and rescue for downed aircraft and for finding and tracking space satellites. The techniques of search theory have been applied to fishing problems (Paloheimo [1971], Mangel and Clark [1982]), police patrol analysis (Larson [1972]), oil exploration (Allais [1957], Cozzolino [1972], Harbaugh et al. [1977]), and medical screening (Gorry et al. [1973]). Searches are planned and executed every day. The purpose of this article is to present an approach to search planning. We propose to do this by stepping the reader through the tasks that comprise the planning and analysis of a search problem. In the process, we will state principles that provide guidance for accomplishing these tasks and then illustrate these principles with examples. The reader will see that our approach encompasses both objective and subjective methods and that it provides for compromises between theoretically optimal plans and operationally feasible ones. In this approach,