Target Engageability Improvement through Adaptive Tracking

Reaction time of current and future naval warships is eroded since they are expected to operate in a large variety of situations with constantly increasing complexity. To cope with diverse air and surface threats, the warships, either operating in a single ship configuration or within a task group, will require their combat power resources to be efficiently managed. The coordination and tight integration during the deployment of these resources will also be required. Decision support aids can help in overcoming the inherent complexity of the naval Command and Control (C2) process and the underlying combat resource management problem [15]. This paper addresses two problems related to target engageability in naval warfare operations: engageability assessment and engageability improvement. Engageability is defined as the feasibility of engagement actions against designated targets. Engageability assessment is concerned with the evaluation of the feasibility of engagement actions based on the involved combat resources, the environmental condition, and the geometry of the engagement. The problem of engageability improvement goes beyond the assessment and aims at making non-feasible engagements feasible by changing the engagement geometry and dynamics. The focus of this paper is on on Anti-Air Warfare (AAW) [7], and more specifically the problem of combat power management to counter Anti-Ship Missiles (ASM). This problem is very constrained by the availability of the combat resources, the most important ones being hardkill and softkill weapons. Furthermore, most of the weapons rely on supporting resources for their deployment. An example of such supporting resources is given by the Fire Control Radars (FCR) [22] that offer a limited number of concurrent channels. Since typical AAW hardkill weapons require FCR support, the engageability of targets using hardkill is very dependent upon the availability of FCR. This is not the case for softkill, which can be fired without the need of FCR. In this work, the availability of FCRs is used as a key parameter in the assessment of the target engageability using hardkill weapons. When required and possible, the engageability is improved by adapting the object1 tracking functionality [1, 4] using an on-line estimation of the FCR search-to-lock-on time. This represents a new approach, which is partly inspired from the work of [10, 11] on covariance control. If the target is not and cannot be made engageable, softkill engagements are advocated. As detailed in the sequel and under given conditions, both engageability assessment and improvement exploit the dependency of the FCR search and lock-on duration on the error covariance of the track of the target to be engaged; the track being provided by the surveillance system. Scenarios involving