A STUDY OF THE COST-EFFECTIVENESS OF AIR DEFENSE SURVEILLANCE RADARS

A study of the cost-effectiveness of air defense surveillance radars is important to a country with large territoty. The cost studied here is the life cycle cost. In addition to the procurement cost, it includes also the maintenance cost, serviceman cost, etc. Statistics indicates that the rising rate of the life cycle cost is less than that of the procuremant cost, and the decreasing tendency of their ratio extends to an asymptote nearly equal to 2. The effectiveness of a radar consists of 2 factors system performance and system usability. An air defense surv-illance radar's system performance involves detection performance, location performance, ECCM performance, count-er-Elint performance and target tracking capacity, each of them being expressed by a calculable formula. Then the system performance is expressed by a weighted product of these sub-performance factors. Using similar analysis, an expression for surveillance radar's usability is also derived. So a calculable expression for the radar's effectiveness is got. The values of many radar's performance, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness ratio have been calculated and regression curves of these values versus first year in service are given. The rising, rate of cost-effectiveness ratio is seen to be 7.5dB/10 year. At last, the applications of these expressions and curves are discussed.