On 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. Experimental results are provided.