Stealthy River Navigation in Jungle Combat Conditions
Abstract
One of the biggest challenges for Brazilian military logisticians is to support effective jungle warfare for both real and training operations carried out by their combat forces in the Amazonian region. The jungle's heat, humidity, and dense vegetation put significant demands on the supply chain. Further, because of the difficulties of land or air transportation, water transport is the most reasonable transportation option to sustain these deployed forces. Planners must select from among the available watercourses those whose surroundings provide stealthy navigation to the combat force location where the requested supplies can be safely unloaded. The author seeks a method of determining a path through a river network that blends short transit times with maximal shade coverage from forest growth along the riverbanks. He combines an astronomical algorithm for computing shade coverage with Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm to determine the start time and routing information necessary for a supply boat to travel from a depot to a resupply point that minimizes weighted risk, which is defined as the product of shade coverage and arc transit time.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 01, 2010
- Accession Number
- ADA516981
Entities
People
- Fabio A. Cardoso
Organizations
- Air Force Institute of Technology