A sensor management method with the limited sensor resources under target detecting is proposed based on risk theory. Firstly

the target detection model and the sensor radiation model are established

with ‘detecting risk’ and ‘radiating risk’ defined. The sum of the two kinds of risk is taken as the sensor management risk function

namely the objective function. Secondly

to get a scheme from the function

the predicted expectation value is taken as the approximation of the objective function

then the objective function is revised. After that

a distributed optimization algorithm based on multi-agent is proposed. The experiment results show that the proposed sensor management method based on risk theory can effectively resolve the problem of sensor management. This method outperforms the previous sensor management method and could solve the problem of sensor management under limited resources with a better solution.