Fast Resource Management Algorithm for Passive Surveillance Systems

Abstract: Passive surveillance systems (PSS) detect and track objects that emit electromagnetic signals from hundreds of kilometers away. These systems have a limited number of receivers and can only observe a fraction of the frequencies of interest simultaneously. To improve its behavior, we propose the ResourceTune algorithm, which iteratively constructs optimized schedules to determine which frequencies each receiver should observe at a given time step. The algorithm's main component is the optimization of receiver configurations using a left-right heuristic combined with linear programming. Our approach is unique because, unlike others, we focus on optimizing available resources and observed frequencies, which was never done before. We experimentally compared the proposed algorithm with a greedy and the state-of-the-art method for construction of PSS schedules. In most of the considered scenarios, ResourceTune outperformed both algorithms, and in the most extreme case, its objective value was more than 2.7 times better than the values reached by other methods.