Information loss due to target mobility

Entropy can be used as a measure of effectiveness to quantify a commander's uncertainty, or information level, about his potential adversary. When surveillance of a detected target is interrupted, information about its current location starts to decrease as a result of the target's ability to move. In this paper, Jon Shupenus and Don Barr develop a stochastic model of target motion and an approximation that admits easy implementation in spreadsheet applications. The approximation is then used to investigate the rates at which target information decays when subjected to various terrain constraints.