Hybrid Genetic Optimization Method for Accurate Target Localization

Abstract

This paper considers the problem of estimating the position of a target based on the time of arrival (TOA) measurements from a set of receivers whose positions are known. The weighted least square (WLS) technique is applied as an efficient existing approach. The optimization problem is formulated by the minimization of the sum of squared residuals between estimated and measured data as the objective function. The hybrid Genetic Algorithm-Nelder-Mead (GA-NM) method is proposed that combines the global search and local search abilities in an effective way in order to improve the performance and the solution accuracy. The corresponding Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) on the localization errors is derived as a benchmark. Simulation results show that the proposed hybrid GA-NM method achieves a significant performance improvement compared to existing methods.