Designing an Interactive Local and Global Decision Support System for Aircraft Carrier Deck Scheduling

Abstract

In the near future, unmanned aerial vehicles will become part of the naval aircraft carrier operating environment. This will add significant complexity to an already highly constrained and dangerous environment. The move towards a shared manned-unmanned environment with an increasing operational tempo in a reduced manning environment will mean more automation is needed in the planning and scheduling of aircraft, ground vehicles, and crew in these complex environments. However, while automated planning algorithms are fast and able to handle large quantities of information in a short period of time, they are often brittle, unable to cope with changing conditions in highly dynamic environments. Recent research has shown that by allowing high-level interaction between human operators and automated planners, significant increases in overall mission performance can achieved. To this end, a user interface has been developed that allows a human decision maker managing aircraft carrier deck operations the ability to interact directly with a centralized planning algorithm for scheduling aircraft in flight and on the deck (both manned and unmanned), as well as ground vehicles and personnel. This Deck operations Course of Action Planner (DCAP) system leverages the experience and high-level, goal-directed behavior of the human decision maker in conjunction with a powerful automated planning algorithm to develop feasible, robust schedules. This article highlights the design features of DCAP and presents preliminary results from an evaluation designed to quantify the value added by layering in planning and scheduling algorithms into this complex decision process.

A Human-Interactive Course of Action Planner for Aircraft Carrier Deck Operations

“…It also has a specialized interface for accepting, displaying, and modifying schedules generated by the automated planner. The reader is referred to [10] for details.…”

Comparing the Performance of Expert User Heuristics and an Integer Linear Program in Aircraft Carrier Deck Operations

“…We then developed both a simulation of aircraft carrier operations and a set of automated decision support algorithms to generate data for comparison. The aforementioned simulation environment is part of the deck operations course of action planner (DCAP), which is designed to facilitate human-automation collaborative planning for the aircraft carrier deck (see [27] for details on the interface design).…”

“…The aircraft priorities were assigned on an integer scale of [1][2][3][4][5], each with an initial priority of 3. While replanning, all the critical aircraft were reassigned a priority value of 5 (for more details on the replanning process, see [27]). The total planning time horizon was selected based on the worst-case estimate of completing all the tasks by assuming the sum of the mean and three sigma values for stochastic task durations and scenario that only one deck resource would be available to perform a task at any time instant.…”

A Task Allocation Model for a Team of Aircraft Launching on the Carrier

“…The existing literature pays more attention to the operations of aircraft on the flight deck like the artificial decision support system [22], path planning algorithm [23], support scheduling model [24], and so on. As far as we know, no relevant literature has reported the task allocation method for aircraft launching on the carrier, although it is important to enhance the safety and efficiency of launching mission.…”