Sensitivity of the Probability of Radar Detection to Radar State Uncertainty

Mission planners for aircraft operating under the threat of detection from ground-based radar systems are often concerned with the probability of detection. Current approaches to path planning in such environments consider the radar state (i.e., radar position and parameters) to be deterministic and known. In practice, there is uncertainty in the radar state, which induces uncertainty in the probability of detection. This article presents a method to incorporate the uncertainty of the radar state in a nonfluctuating radar detection model. The method linearizes the radar detection model with respect to the radar state and uses the linearized models to estimate, to the first order, the variance of the probability of detection. The results in this article validate the linearization using the Monte Carlo analysis and illustrate the sensitivity of the probability of detection to radar state uncertainty.