Development of optimal strategies for slewing spaceborne SAR beams in target-rich environments

Mechanically-slewed spaceborne SAR systems perform well when the number of targets is small, or when the targets are all in the same geographic area. For geographically diverse targets, the order in which the targets are serviced is of great importance. This is especially true when the total number of targets to be serviced is large. It will be shown that the target servicing problem is a variation of the classical traveling salesman problem, which is a well-known problem in optimization theory. This problem is amenable to attack by a number of global search methods, one of which is genetic algorithms. This paper (which represents work in progress) describes the specific requirements of the SAR target servicing problem, maps it into a variation of the classical traveling salesman problem, and presents an approach for implementing an optimizing filter for target scheduling