Comparing the Failure Correction Ability between GA and FA for Array Antenna

Array antenna may be damaged due to the external environment, and the performance of the array will greatly be decreased because of elements failure. In this paper, the effect of elements failure on equispaced linear array pattern based on uniform weighting and two typical beamforming methods is analyzed. If elements failed during operation, significant degradation in the array's performance is obtained. And then, two optimization algorithms were implemented by re-optimizing the weighting coefficients of the non-failed elements to mitigating the influences of the radiation pattern. We investigated the response of the algorithm to redistribute the excitation of remained elements by which parameters and similarity rate of array pattern obtained when elements failed. Finally, the simulation results show that two algorithms can be used to compensate the side lobe level and null depth level of the pattern when the elements are failed in an array. Furthermore, the performance obtained by using Firefly Algorithm is better than Genetic Algorithm under the same iteration.