Optimization of fixed aviation support resource station configuration for aircraft carrier based on aircraft dispatch mission scheduling

Before the dispatch of the carrier-based aircraft, a series of pre-flight preparation oper-ations need to be completed on the flight deck. Flight deck fixed aviation support resource station configuration has an important impact on operation efficiency and sortie rate. However, the resource station configuration is determined during the aircraft carrier design phase and is rarely modified as required, which may not be suitable for some pre-flight preparation missions. In order to solve the above defects, the joint optimization of flight deck resource station configuration and aircraft carrier pre-flight preparation scheduling is studied in this paper, which is formulated as a two-tier optimization decision-making framework. An improved variable neighborhood search algorithm with four original neighborhood structures is presented. Dispatch mission experiment and algorithm performance comparison experiment are carried out in the computational experi-ment section. The correlation between the pre-flight preparation time (makespan) and flight deck cabin occupancy percentage is given, and advantages of the proposed algorithm in solving the mathematical model are verified.(c) 2022 Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

This paper investigates the joint optimization of flight deck resource station configuration and aircraft carrier pre-flight preparation scheduling. An improved variable neighborhood search algorithm is proposed and experiments are conducted to verify its performance in solving the mathematical model.