A Fuzzy Path Selection Strategy for Aircraft Landing on a Carrier

Landing is one of the most dangerous tasks in all the operations on an aircraft carrier, and the landing safety is very important to the pilot and the flight deck operation. Nowadays, the landing safety of carrier aircraft is improved by designing an automatic landing controller and by training the pilot to increase his/her control ability. However, the importance of choosing the landing path has not been investigated thus far. In this paper, the problem of landing path selection for an aircraft carrier is studied as there are several candidates corresponding to different situations. A fuzzy path selection strategy is proposed to solve the problem considering the fuzziness of environmental information and human judgment, and the goal is to provide the pilot with a more reasonable decision. The strategy is in view of the idea of Fuzzy Multi-attribute Group Decision Making (FMAGDM), which has been widely used in industry. Firstly, the background of the landing path selection is given. Then, the factors influencing the decision making are abstracted to build the conceptual model. A TOPSIS-based group decision-making method is developed to denote the preference of each decision maker for each alternative route, and the optimal landing path under the current environment is determined taking into account the knowledge and the weight of both the pilot and the landing console operator (LCO). Experimental studies under different setups, i.e., different environments, are carried out. The results demonstrate that the proposed path selection strategy is validated in different environments, and the optimal landing paths corresponding to different environments can be determined.