Joint Online Route Planning and Resource Optimization for Multitarget Tracking in Airborne Radar Systems

Reasonable route planning and resource allocation strategy in the airborne radar systems (ARS), can sufficiently utilize the limited resources and promote the multitarget tracking (MTT) performance. However, using separately the route planning and resource optimization method cannot take full advantage of the airborne platform. Considering this issue, we propose a joint online route planning and resource optimization strategy in the ARS to improve the system capability for MTT. First, a kinematic model of the ARS, including the mathematical expression between the radar states and the system control parameters, is introduced, which integrates the route planning to the radar scheduling scheme. Next, the posterior Cramer–Rao lower bound about route planning and resource optimization variables for the tracking targets is derived. Then, a scaled-based utility function is established to quantify the MTT performance. Hereafter, a nonconvex problem is formulated by minimizing the utility function with route and resource constraints, and then a efficient three-stage partition-based solution is proposed. Finally, simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Furthermore, over the traditional benchmark algorithm, the tracking performance of the proposed approach improves 30.44%.