Tech and tactics unite to outsmart stealthy submarines

Partnerships and legacies 

Toy connected with Skipper and Svirsko at a conference and realized their research interests in national security and optimization overlapped. Toy’s prior research is based in controlling harmful threats with limited resources —  such as biological viruses or invasive species — but her work can also apply to anticipating enemy threats in the form of stealthy underwater vessels. The team decided to collaborate and submitted a joint proposal to the Office of Naval Research to support the project. Skipper and Svirsko serve as co-primary investigators, and Toy as the project director at Virginia Tech.

Svirsko, Skipper, and undergraduate Naval Academy students will develop the core research models for the project. Toy and her team of graduate students will use their expertise in simulation and algorithms to make the models more efficient and manageable. These simulations will account for unpredictable conditions in open ocean environments, such as weather or the operational status of machines, allowing the research team to predict and prepare for shifting threat locations, resource availability, and the best possible response strategies in real time.

“It is exciting to see how we are leveraging each institution’s strengths,” said Svirsko. “At the Naval Academy, we only have undergraduate students, so we’re focused primarily on building the operations research models. Esra’s team, along with graduate students, can dive deeper into simulations to test the models and other complex aspects we don’t have the capacity for.”

This project builds on operations research disciplines that developed during the second world war to solve military logistics challenges. Virginia Tech and the United States Naval Academy (USNA) are continuing this legacy and ensuring modern defense strategies evolve. 

“Virginia Tech has a strong defense research record,” said Toy. “Teaming up with USNA for this critical project is a huge step forward.”