Evaluation of tactical decision aids for mine field clearance

When clearing sea mines the Navy uses software tools for planning and evaluation of mine clearance operations. One such software tool is for example MCM Expert (Mine Counter Measures EXclusive Planning, Evaluation, Risk assessment Tool). The purpose of this work was to analyse MCM Expert by evaluating it with respect to clearance time and clearance level against our in-house developed software Minesim, as well as against the software tool from Atlas. The in-house developed software Minesim can generate synthetic mine fields with statistical properties that mimic the structure of real mine fields. Minesim simulates synthetic mine clearance where bottom properties, clutter, vessel speed, turn times, classification times, identification times and mine density are taken into account. The uncertainty in the estimated clearance time is assessed by generating a large number of mine fields through Monte Carlo simulations, clearing the fields synthetically and estimating the resulting clearance time for each mine field. At an early stage of this work it became clear that the software tool from Atlas lacked the possibility to evaluate the mine clearance operation with respect to clearance time and clearance level. The Atlas software functionality is in practice limited to estimating the sonar range using a ray tracing program. For this reason a relevant comparison with MCM Expert and Minesim is not possible and the software tool from Atlas is therefore excluded. When comparing the results from Minesim and MCM Expert for the same synthetic mine field, the estimated clearance time is in general longer for MCM Expert. However, if the computation with MCM Expert is updated with information about what has been found and cleared after each track, the difference in clearance time is decreased.