Mission Planning for Mobile Communication Passive Radar via an Evolutionary Algorithm

The spatial arrangement of receiver and transmitter sites defining the layout of a multistatic radar system has crucial influence on the system's performance in achievable estimation accuracy. In this work, we focus on mission planning as the process of determining an optimal layout by selecting a combination of discrete receiver and transmitter sites from fixed size sets of suitable sites. In this context we apply an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) to determine an optimal layout with regard to target state estimation, where we utilize the Cramér-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) as performance metric. Due to a typically large number of combinations, exhaustive search becomes increasingly expensive. The presented approach provides means to find solutions within significantly less time than exhaustive search, making it therefore a viable tool in the context of mission planning for a passive radar system.