Helicopter maritime search area planning based on a minimum bounding rectangle and K-means clustering

Helicopters are widely used in maritime Search and Rescue (SAR) missions. To ensure the success of SAR missions, search areas need to be carefully planned. With the development of computer technology and weather forecast technology, the survivors’ drift trajectories can be predicted more precisely, which strongly supports the planning of search areas for the rescue helicopter. However, the methods used to determine the search area based on the predicted drift trajectories are mainly derived from the continuous expansion of the area with the highest Probability of Containment (POC), which may lead to local optimal solutions and a decrease in the Probability of Success (POS), especially when there are several subareas with a high POC. To address this problem, this paper proposes a method based on a Minimum Bounding Rectangle and K-means clustering (MBRK). A silhouette coefficient is adopted to analyze the distribution of the survivors’ probable locations, which are divided into multiple clusters with K-means clustering. Then, probability maps are generated based on the minimum bounding rectangle of each cluster. By adding or subtracting one row or column of cells or shifting the planned search area, 12 search methods are used to generate the optimal search area starting from the cell with the highest POC in each probability map. Taking a real case as an example, the simulation experiment results show that the POS values obtained by the MBRK method are higher than those obtained by other methods, which proves that the MBRK method can effectively support the planning of search areas and that K-means clustering improves the POS of search plans.