Iron Dome: A proactive real-time system that saves our lives

This is a picture of rocket interception by a system called "Iron Dome".    We live in Israel which has been suffering in the last week massive attacks of rockets.  The defense answer to these rockets is an amazing technology developed in Israel which demonstrates the principle of proactive event-driven computing in real life.   The system consists of the detection part which identifies that a rocket has been launched, the prediction part that anticipates where the rocket will hit,  a decision part that decides whether it is necessary to intercept the rocket, this is a cost-benefit analysis.  In many cases the rockets hit empty spaces, in that case it is not cost-effective to intercept them, since each activation of this system is quite expensive.  If the decision is that it is necessary to intercept the rocket, the decision is what is the best point of interception, and  a missile is fired accordingly.  This is a decision support systems with human in the loop.    The missile itself is equipped with electro-optic sensors.    During the last few days this technology has proven very effective and eliminated quite a lot of potential damage to the civilian population.   Many people have been skeptic about the feasibility of this system.  but the results are impressive.  Furthermore it is a good demonstration of the proactive event-based paradigm.    

The blog and myself are going on short vacation in Germany.  Will return in two weeks.