Abstract: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.
The operations on the aircraft carrier flight deck are carried out in a time-critical and resource-constrained environment with uncertainty, and it is of great significance to optimize the makespan and obtain a robust schedule and resource allocation plan for a greater sortie generation capacity and better operational management of an aircraft carrier. In this paper, a proactive robust optimization method for flight deck scheduling with stochastic operation durations is proposed. Firstly, an operation on node-flow (OONF) network is adopted to model the precedence relationships of multi-aircraft operations, and resource constraints categorized into personnel, support equipment, workstation space, and supply resource are taken into consideration. On this basis, a mathematical model of the robust scheduling problem for flight deck operation (RSPFDO) is established, and the goal is to maximize the probability of completing within the limitative makespan (PCLM) and minimize the weighted sum of expected makespan and variance of makespan (IRM). Then, in terms of proactive planning, both serial and parallel schedule generation schemes for baseline schedule and robust personnel allocation scheme and equipment allocation adjustment scheme for resource allocation are designed. In terms of executing schedules, an RSPFDO-oriented preconstraint scheduling policy (CPC) is proposed. To optimize the baseline schedule and resource allocation, a hybrid teaching-learning-based optimization (HTLBO) algorithm is designed which integrates differential evolution operators, peak crossover operator, and learning-automata-based adaptive variable neighborhood search strategy. Simulation results shows that the HTLBO algorithm outperforms both some other state-of-the-art algorithms for deterministic cases and some existing algorithms for stochastic project scheduling, and the robustness of the flight deck operations can be improved with the proposed resource allocation schemes and CPC policy.
The scheduling problems in mass production, manufacturing, assembly, synthesis, and transportation, as well as internet services, can partly be attributed to a hybrid flow-shop scheduling problem (HFSP). To solve the problem, a reinforcement learning (RL) method for HFSP is studied for the first time in this paper. HFSP is described and attributed to the Markov Decision Processes (MDP), for which the special states, actions, and reward function are designed. On this basis, the MDP framework is established. The Boltzmann exploration policy is adopted to trade-off the exploration and exploitation during choosing action in RL. Compared with the first-come-first-serve strategy that is frequently adopted when coding in most of the traditional intelligent algorithms, the rule in the RL method is first-come-first-choice, which is more conducive to achieving the global optimal solution. For validation, the RL method is utilized for scheduling in a metal processing workshop of an automobile engine factory. Then, the method is applied to the sortie scheduling of carrier aircraft in continuous dispatch. The results demonstrate that the machining and support scheduling obtained by this RL method are reasonable in result quality, real-time performance and complexity, indicating that this RL method is practical for HFSP.
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.
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