Benefits of target prioritization for phased array radar resource management

In a Multi-Function Radar (MFR), the radar surveillance plays a critical role to optimize the radar performance. The surveillance usually takes more time than other functions. In this paper, we use the Adapt_MFR, an MFR radar simulator, to analyze the benefits of target prioritization. By simulation of a multiple target scenario, we try to find out both the benefits and disadvantages of prioritization. The main conclusion is that higher priority targets could be sorted out and assigned with more radar resources, by reducing lower priority targets' usage of radar time. Both kinematic and attribute information are used to calculate the target priorities. More radar resources means a faster update rate for tracking purpose, thus highly manoeuvring and weak targets can be detected and tracked. In the meantime, those lower priority targets could still be tracked using surveillance beams, losing some accuracy.