Development of Analysis and Simulation Models for Evaluating Airborne Radar Surveillance System of Systems

摘要

Airborne Radar Surveillance (ARS) is an important capability for maintaining awareness and for coordinating various operations during both peace as well as crisis times. At present, the majority of ARS solutions are existing aircraft which have been modified in order to be retrofitted with new systems. This increases the cost of the product, while at the same time, the performance of this new design can be limited in certain operational scenarios. In this light, this paper explores the potential of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as ARS platforms by considering their interactions in a System of Systems (SoS) context. Here, the performance of each UAV design is analyzed through a set of system as well as subsystem models, whereas the effects of the SoS collaboration are captured by means of Agent-Based Simulations (ABS). As a case study, a finite number of radar units and UAV designs are initially generated, and then, they are simulated in different operational scenarios in order to identify the performance of each SoS. Overall, the results show that it is possible to use the developed models to capture the physics of all the system levels; that the proposed framework can be a valuable tool for enabling decision making; and that the consideration of SoS for ARS can lead to significant improvements in terms of both mission success as well as operating cost.