Tech and tactics unite to outsmart stealthy submarines

Jordi Shelton

9 Dec 2024

A U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon flies above a formation of surface ships and submarines from the United States, Japan, and the Republic of Korea in the Philippine Sea during Pacific Vanguard 23, July 4, 2023. — A U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon flies above a formation of surface ships and submarines from the United States, Japan, and the Republic of Korea in the Philippine Sea during Pacific Vanguard 23, on July 4, 2023. Photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Santiago Navarro, courtesy of the United States Naval Academy.

Researchers at Virginia Tech and the United States Naval Academy are teaming up to improve submarine surveillance technology.

Funded by a grant from the Office of Naval Research, the collaboration focuses on finding smarter ways to track enemy submarines. The project aims to ensure the Navy can make the best use of its resources in vast ocean areas while staying ahead of emerging threats.

“We have limited resources in a seemingly limitless space — the open ocean,” said Esra Buyuktahtakin Toy, associate professor in the College of Engineering and one of three project leads. “We’re working on figuring out how to use our tools in the smartest way possible to handle this unpredictable environment.”

For the three-year duration of the grant, the research team will focus both on strategic and tactical allocation of resources. Strategic allocation uses surveillance tools to track movement and patterns over time, while tactical allocation focuses on deploying units – such as submarines, warships, or aircraft – to neutralize a threat in the moment. Both strategic and tactical allocation are crucial because they work together to cover vast areas efficiently. Strategic units provide broad detection, while tactical units react quickly to pinpoint and neutralize threats.

Researchers include

Daphne Skipper, associate professor, United States Naval Academy
Anna Svirsko, assistant professor, United States Naval Academy
Toy, associate professor in the Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

Esra Buyuktahtakin Toy, an associate professor in the College of Engineering, is teaming up with researchers at the United States Naval Academy to improve submarine surveillance technology. Photo by Jordi Shelton for Virginia Tech.

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.”