A Novel Comprehensive Model of Suitability Analysis for Matching Area in Underwater Geomagnetic Aided Inertial Navigation

Geomagnetic aided inertial navigation is a way to use the geophysical field for navigation. It can locate the carrier position by the correlation between geomagnetic data and running track. It is an effective mean to realize autonomous navigation. Matching area suitability is one of the important factors affecting geomagnetic aided inertial navigation. Through the suitability analysis of matching areas, the areas with obvious geomagnetic features and rich information are selected as matching areas, which can effectively improve the real-time and accuracy of geomagnetic aided navigation. However, matching area suitability analysis for geomagnetic aided navigation is a complex process and needs to consider diverse factors, based on which a decision may be made. The area suitability analysis inherently can be considered as a multicriterion decision analysis (MCDA) problem. This paper presented a novel comprehensive model combining principal component analysis (PCA) and analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to evaluate the suitability of the navigation matching area. Firstly, according to the features of the areas, key feature parameters and the corresponding weights are determined by PCA and AHP, respectively. Then comprehensive evaluation values of the navigation matching areas are calculated through the comprehensive model. Finally, experiments were implemented in Bohai Bay; the correlation-matching algorithm is applied to verify the validity of the model in the areas. The experiment results well indicate the consistency between the comprehensive evaluation value and the matching area suitability. It is reasonable to regard the comprehensive evaluation value as a basis for area suitability analysis.