Proactive Radar Resource Management with Adaptive Arrays

Today, the Army’s spectral dominance is achieved via disparate systems that require individualized life cycle support, complex and time consuming spectral deconfliction, and extensive development effort to counter evolving threat sets. These single-purpose systems are traditionally composed of subsystems with proprietary interfaces that inherently limit module reuse and promote sole-source vendor selection over open competition. This inhibits potential technological and cost enhancements. Recent developments in enabling sensor technology such as digital beamforming, high capacity computing, and arbitrary waveform generation provide the requisite hardware foundation for a single multi-mission radar capable of providing battlefield Air Surveillance (AS), Air Defense (AD), and Counterfire Target Acquisition (CTA). Furthermore, current systems that perform multiple missions are often unable to perform those missions in parallel. Under strenuous mission loads, these radars will not have enough resources to sequentially perform all required tasks in optimal fashion. Balancing the competing time and energy needs of each mission in a single system while providing an effectiveness assessment requires a novel approach to intelligent resource management. To address these challenges Spear Research, LLC has formulated a holistic Multi-Mission Resource Manager (MMRM) that optimizes use of limited resources, while forecasting mission performance, to proactively direct a highly effective multi-mission radar.