Comparing the performance of expert user heuristics and an integer linear program in aircraft carrier deck operations

Carrier-borne aircrafts aviation operation automated scheduling using multiplicative weights apprenticeship learning

Efficiency and safety are vital for aviation operations in order to improve the combat capacity of aircraft carrier. In this article, the theory of apprenticeship learning, as a kind of artificial intelligence technology, is applied to constructing the method of automated scheduling. First, with the use of Markov decision process frame, the simulative model of aircrafts launching and recovery was established. Second, the multiplicative weights apprenticeship learning algorithm was applied to creating the optimized scheduling policy. In the situation with an expert to learn from, the learned policy matches quite well with the expert’s demonstration and the total deviations can be limited within 3%. Finally, in the situation without expert’s demonstration, the policy generated by multiplicative weights apprenticeship learning algorithm shows an obvious superiority compared to the three human experts. The results of different operation situations show that the method is highly robust and well functional.

Path Planning for Aircraft Fleet Launching on the Flight Deck of Carriers

This paper studies the path planning problem for aircraft fleet taxiing on the flight deck of carriers, which is of great significance for improving the safety and efficiency level of launching. As there are various defects of manual command in the flight deck operation of carriers, the establishment of an automatic path planner for aircraft fleets is imperative. The requirements of launching, the particularities of the flight deck environment, the way of launch, and the work mode of catapult were analyzed. On this basis, a mathematical model was established which contains the constraints of maneuverability and the work mode of catapults; the ground motion and collision detection of aircraft are also taken into account. In the design of path planning algorithm, path tracking was combined with path planning, and the strategy of rolling optimization was applied to get the actual taxi path of each aircraft. Taking the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier as an example, the taxi paths of aircraft fleet launching was planned with the proposed method. This research can guarantee that the aircraft fleet complete launching missions safely with reasonable taxi paths.

A Dynamic Scheduling Method for Carrier Aircraft Support Operation under Uncertain Conditions Based on Rolling Horizon Strategy

The efficient scheduling of carrier aircraft support operations in the flight deck is important for battle performances. The supporting operations and maintenance processes involve multiple support resources, complex scheduling process, and multiple constraints; the efficient coordination of these processes can be considered a multi-resource constrained multi-project scheduling problem (MRCMPSP), which is a complex non-deterministic polynomial-time hard (NP-hard) problem. The renewable resources include the operational crews, resource stations, and operational spaces, and the non-renewable resources include oil, gas, weapons, and electric power. An integer programming mathematical model is established to solve this problem. A periodic and event-driven rolling horizon (RH) scheduling strategy inspired by the RH optimization method from predictive control technology is presented for the dynamic scheduling environment. The periodic horizon scheduling strategy can track the changes of the carrier aircraft supporting system, and the improved event-driven mechanism can avoid unnecessary scheduling with effective resource allocation under uncertain conditions. The dual population genetic algorithm (DPGA) is designed to solve the large-scale scheduling problem. The activity list encoding method is proposed, and a new adaptive crossover and mutation strategy is designed to improve the global exploration ability. The double schedule for leftward and rightward populations is integrated into the genetic process of alternating iterations to improve the convergence speed and decrease the computation amount. The computational results show that our approach is effective at solving the scheduling problem in the dynamic environment, as well as making better decisions regarding disruption on a real-time basis.