Joint Tracking Sequence and Dwell Time Allocation for Multi-Target Tracking with Phased Array Radar

Abstract Phased array radars (PAR) are demonstrated to provide enhanced performance for target tracking due to their agile beamforming. In this paper, a joint tracking sequence and dwell time allocation (JTSDTA) strategy is proposed for multi-target tracking (MTT) based on a PAR system. At its core, for the first time, the implementations of target tracking and searching are considered to be interleaved, and the effect of the revisit time on the tracking performance is emerged when arranging the sequence of target tracking. In this context, a time-aware posterior Cramer-Rao lower bound is presented to quantify the individual tracking performance. Then, the JTSDTA is formulated as an optimization problem with respect to the coupled integer and continuous variables. A two steps-based decoupling algorithm is proposed to solve the problem efficiently. Numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the validity of the proposed JTSDTA strategy.