Task selection and scheduling in multifunction multichannel radars

In a multifunction radar, several tasks with differing parameters, such as tracking and surveillance, must be scheduled on a timeline. In an overload situation, the scheduling can become a challenging problem, as some of the tasks may need to be delayed or even dropped. With recent advancements in multichannel radars, e.g., multifrequency radars, it is possible to perform multiple tasks on different channels in parallel. This leads to us considering the NP-hard problem of optimal task scheduling for multiple channels. We extend previously proposed heuristic approaches to the multichannel case; but our main contribution is an optimal solution based on the branch-and-bound (B&B) method. The heuristics are suboptimal but have the advantage of low computational complexity. On the other hand, the optimal solution provides significantly better performance than the heuristics, but has high computational burden and is likely impractical for real-time scheduling. However, the B&B approach does provide the performance upper bound on heuristics and can be used to train a cognitive task scheduler.