Sunday, May 26, 2013

SAR Vessel Patrolling

Sometimes, SAR patrol vessels remain stationed at their base. Other times, they may be out patrolling or being multi-tasked for other purposes. It is important to understand the implications of the SAR vessel position when an emergency call comes in. Various GIS tools within MARIS have been used to examine the relationship between the Patrol vessels position and transit times to incidents. This figure shows various shadings corresponding to increasing transit time bands (to historical incident distributions) for a vessel patrolling of the East coast of Prince Edward Island. Given the historical distribution of incidents, the center white area represents the minimium average distance to all incidents. Assuming the distribution of incidents doesn't change drastically in the future, positioning the SAR vessel in this centre white area would reduce the distance the vessel has to travel to an incident. In the pink zone, the expected transit time would be somewhat longer based on the average of all incidents, and so on.