3 research outputs found
Autonomous agents for multi-function radar resource management
The multifunction radar, aided by advances in electronically steered phased array technology, is capable
of supporting numerous, differing and potentially conflicting tasks. However, the full potential of the
radar system is only realised through its ability to automatically manage and configure the finite resource
it has available. This thesis details the novel application of agent systems to this multifunction radar
resource management problem. Agent systems are computational societies where the synergy of local
interactions between agents produces emergent, global desirable behaviour.
In this thesis the measures and models which can be used to allocate radar resource is explored; this
choice of objective function is crucial as it determines which attribute is allocated resource and consequently
constitutes a description of the problem to be solved. A variety of task specific and information
theoretic measures are derived and compared. It is shown that by utilising as wide a variety of measures
and models as possible the radar’s multifunction capability is enhanced.
An agent based radar resource manager is developed using the JADE Framework which is used
to apply the sequential first price auction and continuous double auctions to the multifunction radar
resource management problem. The application of the sequential first price auction leads to the development
of the Sequential First Price Auction Resource Management algorithm from which numerous
novel conclusions on radar resource management algorithm design are drawn. The application of the
continuous double auction leads to the development of the Continuous Double Auction Parameter Selection
(CDAPS) algorithm. The CDAPS algorithm improves the current state of the art by producing
an improved allocation with low computational burden. The algorithm is shown to give worthwhile
improvements in task performance over a conventional rule based approach for the tracking and surveillance
functions as well as exhibiting graceful degradation and adaptation to a dynamic environment