Simulating Pirate Behavior to Exploit Environmental Information

Abstract

Recent years have seen an upsurge in piracy, particularly off the Horn of Africa. Piracy differs from other asymmetric threats, such as terrorism, in that it is economically motivated. Pirates operating off East Africa have threatened maritime safety and cost commercial shipping billions of dollars paid in ransom. Piracy in this region is conducted from small boats which can only survive for a few days away from their base of operations, have limited survival in severe weather, and cannot perform boarding operations in high wind or sea state conditions. In this study, we use agent models and statistical design of experiments to gain insight into how meteorological and oceanographic forecasts can be used to dynamically predict relative risks for commercial shipping.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 2010
Accession Number
ADA554287

Entities

People

  • Dashi I. Singham
  • Eva Regnier
  • James A. Hansen
  • Leslie Esher
  • Paul J. Sanchez
  • Stacey Hall

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Agent-Based Simulations
  • Computing-Related Activities
  • Data Science
  • Experimental Design
  • Grids
  • Industrial Engineering
  • Information Science
  • Models
  • Oceans
  • Operations Research
  • Simulations
  • Spatial Distribution
  • Statistics
  • Task Forces
  • United States
  • United States Central Command

Fields of Study

  • Environmental science

Readers

  • Naval Engineering and Maritime Security
  • Ocean-Atmosphere Mesoscale Modeling, Data Assimilation, and Flux Boundary Layers
  • Systems Analysis and Design