<title>Rapid trade-space realization of IR missile seeker design with a dynamic performance model</title>

Abstract

Tactical air-to-air or ground-to-air IR missile seeker design involves a vast number of interrelated design criteria spread over a very large parameter space. To further exacerbate matters, many of these critical parameters are dynamic in nature. A common approach to seeker design is to model the behavior of each critical component, or set of components, with a mathematical simulation of its predicted behavior. While this approach is generally very high in fidelity, it tends to be very computationally (and man-hour) intensive, requiring a large number of iterations for each component. Furthermore, many of these modeled components, for example, signal processing, are both space- and time-dependent in nature, and hence are dynamically related to the missile flyout (dynamics) model; consequently, they cannot be fully modeled by a purely static model. An end-to-end (launch to closest approach) dynamic seeker performance model is briefly described herein, which allows for rapid trade space realization over all relevant seeker parameters, and an example seeker design flowdown using the dynamic performance model is presented.