Evolutionary multi‐objective optimisation of the pulse burst waveform in solid‐state VHF moving target detection radar

A solid‐state, very high frequency (VHF) band, moving target detection air surveillance radar requires a complex pulse burst waveform to mitigate the visibility issues originating from the blind Doppler intervals and range eclipsing. The waveform employs multiple pulse repetition frequencies to mitigate the effects of the blind Doppler intervals and interleaves short and long pulses to mitigate range eclipsing. In the authors’ previous works, they pointed out that the waveform design is a multi‐objective optimisation problem and defined the mathematical model of the waveform optimisation problem. They also presented how the exact Pareto optimal (PO) set can be determined by means of exhaustive search. In this paper, they improve the mathematical model of the waveform optimisation problem by altering the way in which one of the objective functions is calculated and adding a new constraint, which eliminates meaningless solutions. Finally, they propose a solution method based on a multi‐objective evolutionary algorithm. The performance evaluation test indicates that compared to the exhaustive search, the proposed method provides a solution that is insignificantly different. However, the proposed method is more scalable and requires over three orders of magnitude smaller number of comparisons to determine the PO set, which makes it more viable for the online waveform adaptation.