Integration Design of Sortie Scheduling for Carrier Aircrafts Based on Hybrid Flexible Flowshop

Abstract

Previous studies focused on deck-disposed and trajectory planning problem separately, and there was no systematic study from the whole process. This paper studied sortie scheduling for carrier aircrafts from the perspective of the whole scheduling and dispatch process. According to the process of sortie on flight deck, the sortie task was abstracted into six virtual stages, namely, deck-disposed, taxiing to preparing spot, taxiing from preparing spot to catapult, preparation on the catapult, takeoff, and cooling and recovery for the jet blast deflectors, and, the corresponding machines were also defined, respectively. The constraints were expressed, and the sortie scheduling model was build based on hybrid flexible flowshop scheduling. In addition, the one-sided symplectic pseudospectral method and the proposed collision avoidance strategy based on priority principle were combined to realize the collaborative trajectories planning of taxiing for multiple aircrafts. To obtain the optimal or near optimal solution, the double-layer genetic algorithm was proposed. Finally, the experiments were carried out based on the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier; the sortie task of 8 aircrafts under unknown conditions of deck-disposed and 13 aircrafts with fixed deck-disposed were studied, respectively. Experimental results show that the established model can well describe the sortie of aircraft, and it meets all constraints and actual requirements, which shows that the proposed method and the model can be used for sortie task effectively.