Chemical agent detector placement methodology

Abstract

Terrorism is a threat to global peace in our world today and in the future this terrorist threat is surely going to be important. Global terrorist groups have highly sophisticated weapon systems with them to terrorize the humanity. Asymmetric warfare which is accepted especially by rough states against free nations is also a threat to humanity. It includes terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, electronic and information war. In this concept, nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) weapons are the most preferred ones in asymmetric warfare strategy because of their special characteristics. According to this strategy; cities, urban territories, critical military and civilian facilities are the main targets of terrorist attacks. In many developing countries, military zones which were located out of cities at first, happened to be surrounded by urban territories. This situation made the military zones more vulnerable to attacks by terrorists hiding amongst civilians. Another reason for military zones to be a possible target for attacks is the great terror on civilians which will be probably caused by such an attack. In this kind of sensational attacks, chemical agents and chemical weapons will be probably used because of their characteristics. This analytical research is done because key military zones mentioned above must be defensed against these kinds of attacks. While formulating the problem, to find the best locations for the point and the line of sight detectors which are used to identify chemical hazard and warn friendly forces about approaching danger, two models are structured and proposed on the basis of The Maximal Covering and The Maximal Expected Covering Models. In the proposed models, the optimum locations for detectors and alarms are found and the best matching between these detectors and alarms is given. In this research, for a threat point to be covered by a detector, that point must be in the detection range and an alarm must be linked to that detector. Additionally, for the line of the sight detection systems, a threat point must be in the line of sight of detectors. According to the method of this research, chemical defence systems are tried to be optimally set in key military zones during peace time well before attacks. With the proposed models, a solution and an analysis are done in a selected military zone as an example and that zone is tried to be defensed against a possible chemical terrorist attack.