A Heuristic Methodology for Optimal Deployment of Radar Systems in a Constrained Area of Operation

In emerging network-centric warfare scenarios, the location of sensors in the sensor-grid plays a dominant role in determining the effectiveness of air defence against enemy air threats. Maximising the coverage area of sensors in the sensor-grid, considering operational performance parameters, terrain features and deployability is a challenging task for military operational planners and commanders. Such optimisation problems may not be amenable to classical operations research techniques, or may require enormous computational time to arrive at the results as the decision space grows non-linearly for large areas of operation. In this paper, a novel methodology that uses a heuristic technique (genetic algorithms) to compute the optimal or near-optimal deployment locations for a given set of sensors in a constrained area of operation is proposed. The proposed methodology is illustrated with a number of case studies and a decision support tool is developed as an aid to the military commanders.