MODELING SENSORS AND THREATS IN A THREE-DIMENSIONAL REAL-TIME SIMULATION OF A SEAPORT ENVIRONMENT By ALLEN CHRISTIANSEN

The members of the Committee appointed to examine the thesis of ALLEN CHRISTIANSEN find it satisfactory and recommend that it be accepted. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENT I would like to acknowledge the help and guidance that my graduate advisor Professor Lawrence Holder gave me throughout the entirety of the project. He helped me to look at problems I was encountering from a different angle, and encouraged me to explore new ideas I had on how to improve the project, regardless of how strange they sounded. I would also like to thank him for having patience with me when I procrastinated making the progress I should have been. I would also like to acknowledge the help of Dr. Cook, and Dr. Lewis in providing me with areas of research I overlooked in order to make the project more complete. Chair: Larry Holder Performing on-site testing for security configurations for a seaport can be quite costly both from a financial, and security perspective due to the effects that testing an ineffective configuration could have on both the efficiency and safety of the seaport in question. In order to alleviate these costs a simulation can be used to analyze new security configurations without disrupting normal operations. We postulate that such a simulation can provide enough fidelity that, even with performance limitations, an accurate evaluation of sensor configurations can be provided. We present the development of the particle emitter and sensor system which is used in PortSimulator, a three-dimensional simulation environment which can help security professionals perform cost effective analysis on configurations of passive sensors in a seaport environment. The main focus for our work was to try to develop a system which could provide the most accurate information while dealing with system performance constraints. Our tests for the different systems focus primarily on the aspect of performance. We address how the accuracy of our two primary propagation systems degrades when the number of particles fired at it increases. We also address ratios of sensors and emitters in regards to at what point does the number of sensors or emitters cause the system to perform so poorly that it is no longer usable.