Consensus-Based Track Association with Multistatic Sensors under a Nested Probabilistic-Numerical Linguistic Environment

Track association is an important technology in military and civilian fields. Due to the increasingly complex environment and the diversity of the sensors, it is a key factor to separate the corresponding track from multiple maneuvering targets by multisensors with a consensus. In this paper, we first transform the track association problem to multiattribute group decision making (MAGDM), and describe the MAGDM with nested probabilistic-numerical linguistic term sets (NPNLTSs). Then, a consensus model with NPNLTSs is constructed which has two key processes. One is a consensus checking process, and the other is a consensus modifying process. Based on which, a track association algorithm with automatic modification is put forward based on the consensus model. After that, the solution of a case study in practice is given to obtain the corresponding track by the proposed method, and it provides technical support for the track association problems. Finally, we make comparisons with other methods from three aspects, and the results show that the proposed method is effective, feasible, and applicable. Moreover, some discussions about the situation where there is only one echo point at a time are provided, and we give a discriminant analysis method.