Optimisation of Periodic Search Strategies for Electronic Support

Solutions to the sensor-scheduling problem in electronic support (ES) are central to successful receiver operation. The scenario is examined in which a programmable, frequency-agile receiver is required to monitor a wide bandwidth for threat emitters from a known list. A theory is developed to allow the sweep time of the receiver, together with individual dwell times on each band, to be jointly optimised in order to minimise the intercept time with threat emitters. In theoretical and simulation studies, it is found that improvements of more than 10%, and sometimes much more, can be achieved on maximum and expected intercept times with respect to other periodic and jittered search strategies.