Ocean Mesh Grid: Applications in Shipping Modeling Many maritime transportation applications in operations research and analytics require computation of the shortest distance (or time) between two arbitrary positions on the ocean. In this paper, we show how xe2x80x9cobject meshingxe2x80x9d used in engineering applications can be applied to provide a network over the ocean that enables such computation. We present a short description of potential applications in shipping modeling as well as a comparison of computational accuracy with an established porttoport marine distance table. The numerical results suggest that a shortestpath algorithm applied to our network approximation of the ocean surface performs well for longer distances but relatively poorly for short voyages.

Performance Guarantees for Receding Horizon Search with Terminal Cost We present a novel method of using terminal costs in the construction of a receding horizon search path. We prove that the proposed method of constructing search paths provides a theoretical lower bound on the performance of the search path. Our result can be interpreted as ensuring that the receding horizon path performs no worse in expectation than a given suboptimal search path. This result is especially practical for subsea applications where, due to use of sidescan sonar in search applications, search paths typically consist of parallel straight lines. Thus for subsea search applications, our approach ensures that expected performance is no worse than the usual subsea search path, and it might be much better. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method by planning search paths in simulation using realworld data that was acquired by an autonomous underwater vehicle during a subsea survey of Boston Harbor.