Resource management for airborne surveillance radars

Discusses the radar resource management research currently being undertaken at Thales Aerospace. A detailed simulation of a radar resource manager and the associated environment and target models has been produced in order to investigate resource management and its integration with tracking, as well as its application to an airborne surveillance radar and related scenarios. Several potential benefits may be predicted through the use of such a system as compared to a conventional track-while-scan (TWS) radar, including increased detection range, reduced track initiation time, and the ability to more intelligently consider secondary sources of information such as digital terrain elevation data and a clutter map when making decisions. Several example problems are discussed, with simulation results presented, including the use of adaptive track update times for the case where two or more tracks mix, the use of a target likelihood function to schedule additional looks for targets in a clutter environment and so reduce track initialisation time, and operator interface considerations.