Some aspects of multi-radar tracking

Three different aspects of a multi-radar simulation study aimed at determining the best tracking organization and algorithms are presented. The first aspect is that of tracking groups of aircraft which are not all individually resolvable. Simulation showed that a manually defined quadrilateral enclosing the aircraft could be used for filtering the formation while tracking was performed by evaluating the centroid of the group and tracking it as a single entity. In any tracking system height is required primarily for tactical reasons, but in a multi-radar tracking system it is also required for the co-ordinate conversion of the measured plot position to the common tracking plane. There is therefore an additional requirement to produce accurate height information in order to improve the tracking performance. The height accuracy can, in general, be improved by height filtering. A possible algorithm is described. The implications of uncoupling the multi-radar Kalman filter are considered in terms of tracking performance. It is shown that under certain circumstances the tracking performance is considerably degraded when an uncoupled Kalman filter is implemented.