Multifunction Radar Resource Management

Electronic scanning is set to become the norm for future radar systems. This brings about many advantages such as the ability to re-point the radar beam at will, to dwell in order to optimize detection, tracking, and classification, and to adjust spatial sensitivity to cope with sources of interference. It is nowthe radar that has to make many of the decisions previously carried out by a human, and this must be done on much faster and possibly pulseby-pulse basis. This therefore gives rise to the question, "How does the radar make these decisions in order to maximize the potential offered by electronic scanning?" The answer requires the radar to move towards a degree of intelligence in the way processing is carried out; it needs to utilize maximum prior knowledge and must arrive at robust solutions to problems such as multitarget tracking, and so on. In this chapter we examine part of the answer to this question by comparing the performance of scheduling methods and of hard and soft logic approaches to theway in which volumes of surveillance space are prioritized. Examples are given for a generic naval radar system that has to cope with a number of evolving tasks to show the effects of the differing approaches. © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.