Thinning Planar Phased Arrays by Means of Hybrid Analytical‐Evolutionary Optimization

This work deals with the design of planar thinned phased arrays. An innovative 2D hybrid thinning procedure is proposed to combine the efficiency of analytical almost difference sets (ADSs) with the effectiveness of genetic algorithms (GAs) to enable faster convergence rates and improved side-lobe suppression with respect to classical thinning strategies. The performance of the proposed ADSGA method are carefully assessed by means of selected numerical results. Moreover, a comparison with competitive state-of-the-art approaches addressing the same design problem is shown, as well.