A quantitative comparison of two different models of minefield transit

Abstract

Naval mines are used to cause damage and inflict casualties on ships and to deny access to mined areas. Two distinctly different Monte Carlo models of surface ships transiting minefields were implemented and compared. An analytic model represents mines abstractly as mine density within the minefield. It determines the probability of a ship encountering a mine as a ratio of the area of the ship’s track through the minefield, with width equal to the mines’ effective radius and the area of the minefield. A geometric model represents the ship’s track and the mines’ locations explicitly. It determines whether a ship encounters a mine using a calculation of the distance between a ship’s track and the mines’ locations. The two models’ results were quantitatively compared for multiple values of five experimental variables: minefield dimensions, mine density, mine placement method, ships per group, and ship transit procedure. Each model was executed for each combination of experimental variable values and their results were compared to determine whether the models produced comparable results. In addition, the effectiveness of two mine placement methods at disabling ships and two ship transit procedures at avoiding mines were also compared. All comparisons used statistical hypothesis tests.