Operational Reliability Metric to Characterize Radar Detection Performability

摘要

Historically, reliability studies of electronic systems, including radar, have primarily focused on the trustworthiness and endurance of the hardware components of the system. While the radar's hardware is indeed a crucial part of the system, the signal processing aspects of the radar and the actual operating conditions, such as the environment and aging, have been neglected in previous reliability studies. In this paper, the operational reliability paradigm is used to analyze the parameters of the radar's signal processor and their effects on the radar's target detection performance while in service. A detection threshold is derived using the operational reliability formulation that can be optimized for given target and clutter statistics.