Radar placement optimization based on adaptive multi-objective meta-heuristics

Airspace surveillance is a significant issue for many countries to control and manage their airspace. The number of radars used and their coverage rate are the main issues to consider in this case. Therefore, this paper addresses the problem of finding the best radar locations to obtain the highest coverage rate with the least possible number of radars in a certain region. The radar placement problem is considered as a multi-objective optimization problem with two objectives: the number of radars and the coverage rate. To perfectly solve this optimization problem, a set of multi-objective meta-heuristic approaches based on simulated annealing, memory-based steady-state genetic algorithm, a decomposition-based multi-objective algorithm with differential evolution, and non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) are utilized. Algorithms are tested on a dataset created using DTED-1 map elevation data for two different selected regions. Based on the results, the NSGA-II algorithm achieves the best results and the highest coverage ratios among the tested algorithms. Two improved versions of the NSGA-II algorithm are also proposed to enhance its performance and make it more suitable for solving this optimization problem. The experimental results show that a coverage rate of 98% could be achieved with a small number of radars, and by increasing the number of radars, it exceeds 99%.