In the paper this morning, the front page article was on debris tracking and prediction for Air France Flight 447. Software developed by the Coast Guard in Portsmouth is being used in the recovery effort to predict where debris is located. Ocean currents are used along with the last known location of the plane to predict the most likely places where debris will be found. A density map of location probabilities is shown in the article and I knew without reading it they were using Monte Carlo simulation. This was confirmed in the article.
Using water current and Monte Carlo simulation to predict object positions in water? This sounds really similar to our Sidewinder paper. It’s strange enough that the people who did this debris location prediction practically live right down the block.
There are plenty of differences, though. I would bet that the Coast Guard’s current model is much more advanced than a general group velocity with random deviations for all objects involved. Instead of predicting debris location, we use Sequential Monte Carlo simulation to predict the location of a sink node in a mobile wireless sensor network. The prediction is refined over multiple hops to make routing more reliable and efficient in a highly mobile environment, such as floating sensors routing data in a flood tracking application. A similar density plot to the one provided in the paper is created at each hop for the estimated sink location. This density plot becomes darker and smaller with each hop as the refinement occurs. I’m guessing that the Coast Guard doesn’t use such sequential refinement.
So where’s my front page newspaper article on SMC prediction and flood tracking?
Recent Comments