Autonomous sortie scheduling for carrier aircraft fleet under towing mode

Safe and efficient sortie scheduling on the confined flight deck is crucial for maintaining high combat effectiveness of the aircraft carrier. The primary difficulty exactly lies in the spatiotemporal coordination, i.e., allocation of limited supporting resources and collision-avoidance between heterogeneous dispatch entities. In this paper, the problem is investigated in the perspective of hybrid flow-shop scheduling problem by synthesizing the precedence, space and resource constraints. Specifically, eight processing procedures are abstracted, where tractors, preparing spots, catapults, and launching are virtualized as machines. By analyzing the constraints in sortie scheduling, a mixed-integer planning model is constructed. In particular, the constraint on preparing spot occupancy is improved to further enhance the sortie efficiency. The basic trajectory library for each dispatch entity is generated and a delayed strategy is integrated to address the collision-avoidance issue. To efficiently solve the formulated HFSP, which is essentially a combinatorial problem with tightly coupled constraints, a chaos-initialized genetic algorithm is developed. The solution framework is validated by the simulation environment referring to the Fort-class carrier, exhibiting higher sortie efficiency when compared to existing strategies. And animation of the simulation results is available at www.bilibili.com/video/BV14t421A7Tt/. The study presents a promising supporting technique for autonomous flight deck operation in the foreseeable future, and can be easily extended to other supporting scenarios, e.g., ammunition delivery and aircraft maintenance.