On Scheduling a Single Machine to Minimize a Function of Distances Between Pairs of Tasks: Scheduling a Multifunction Radar

Among several other tasks, the radar of a fighter has to search, track and identify potential targets. The waveforms used by the radar for each of these tasks are most often incompatible and hence, cannot be processed simultaneously. Moreover, these tasks are repeated several times in a cyclic fashion. Altogether, this defines a complex scheduling problem that impacts a lot on the quality of the radar´s output. In this paper, we define a formal framework for this real time scheduling problem and we introduce several techniques to compute efficient schedules for the radar. We also describe a set of lower bounds for the scheduling problem. Experimental results are provided