Sensor information monotonicity in disambiguation protocols

Previous work has considered the problem of swiftly traversing a marked traversal-medium where the marks represent probabilities that associated local regions are traversable, further supposing that the traverser is equipped with a dynamic capability to disambiguate these regions en route. In practice, however, the marks are given by a noisy sensor, and are only estimates of the respective probabilities of traversability. In this paper, we investigate the performance of disambiguation protocols that utilize such sensor readings. In particular, we investigate the difference in performance when a disambiguation protocol employs various sensors ranked by their estimation quality. We demonstrate that a superior sensor can yield superior traversal performance—so called Sensor Information Monotonicity. In so doing, we provide to the decision-maker the wherewithal to quantitatively assess the advantage of a superior (and presumably more expensive) sensor in light of the associated improvement in performance. Journal of the Operational Research Society advance online publication, 3 February 2010 doi:10.1057/jors.2009.152