Angle of arrival based positioning technology is commonly used in the field of passive surveillance. However

in a multisensor-multitarget situation

it is difficult to determine the association between measurements directly

and an effective data association is required before target positioning. Aimed to solve the problem

this paper presents a new data association approach of angel of arrival (AOA) based on multidirection-ordered association. Firstly

the approach designs a cost function to describe the possibility of association between measurements

and uses the Jacobian to estimate the variance of components of error vector. Secondly

to compute the association results

the assignment and optimization ideas are used to compute the directions of partial association and the order of association between sensors

respectively. The simulation results show that the approach is effective for the association of measurements of intensive targets and random targets.