A research team at Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a coordinated sensing framework called Persistent Dynamic Nuclear Activity Monitoring through Intelligent Coordinated Sensing (DyNAMICS) that integrates hardware and software to make monitoring applications more efficient.
The team includes collaborators from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Nevada National Security Sites, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories.
“Modern monitoring systems face a fundamental constraint: it is neither practical nor affordable to observe everything everywhere all the time,” said Norma Pawley, a scientist at Los Alamos and leader of the Persistent DyNAMICS project. “Persistent DyNAMICS makes long-term monitoring practical and affordable. It supports critical national security needs like nuclear material monitoring and border surveillance, as well as commercial uses such as emergency response, medical services, pipeline monitoring, railway health tracking and wildfire detection.”
Lucas Parker, a Los Alamos scientist and Persistent DyNAMICS team member, added, “By enabling persistent awareness with finite resources, this technology delivers faster insights at lower cost without sacrificing reliability.”
Critical applications — such as safeguarding infrastructure, securing borders and overseeing high-risk facilities — require continuous situational awareness to detect anomalies early. Yet the volume of data generated by large-scale sensor networks, combined with significant background noise, makes comprehensive data collection and processing prohibitively expensive.
This creates a challenging tradeoff. Systems can either allocate substantial resources to investigate every potential signal — driving up operational costs — or accept gaps in coverage that risk missing consequential events. Striking a balance between sensitivity, reliability and cost remains a central challenge in modern sensing architectures.
A coordinated sensing strategy
Persistent DyNAMICS addresses this challenge through a coordinated sensing framework that integrates hardware and software to optimize the use of limited resources. Rather than continuously collecting all available data, the system prioritizes targeted observation, focusing on acquiring the most relevant information at the most opportune times and locations.
The approach relies on dynamic coordination among distributed sensors. As activities of interest emerge, sensors adapt by increasing their sensitivity or redirecting attention, improving the likelihood of detecting meaningful signals. At the same time, multiple sensors collaborate to corroborate observations, reducing false positives while increasing confidence in detections.
When anomalous behavior is identified, the system employs a tiered response strategy. Initial follow-up actions are designed to be low-cost and minimally invasive. Only when preliminary evidence indicates a higher likelihood of significance does the system escalate to more resource-intensive interventions, such as deploying unmanned aerial systems or personnel. This graduated response model enables efficient allocation of resources while maintaining responsiveness to potential threats.
Edge-based intelligence for real-time awareness
A key technical feature of Persistent DyNAMICS is its use of edge computing. Instead of transmitting large volumes of raw data to centralized processing centers, analysis is performed locally at or near the point of collection. Sensors generate concise, information-rich alerts, such as indicators of abnormal vibration or movement, rather than continuous data streams. This reduces bandwidth requirements and enables near real-time decision-making.
Implications and applications
By aligning sensing effort with operational priorities, Persistent DyNAMICS makes monitoring more practical and cost-effective.
More broadly, the approach demonstrates how intelligent coordination and local data processing can transform large-scale sensing systems. By reducing unnecessary data collection and focusing on actionable information, Persistent DyNAMICS enables faster, more reliable insights while operating within realistic resource constraints.
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