Research on integrated scheduling of shipboard helicopters sortie operation on amphibious assault ship

Deck operation scheduling is the key technology to improve the sortie rate of carrier-based aircraft. In view of the multi-stage and high coupling characteristics of amphibious assault ship carrier-borne helicopters operation, an integrated scheduling model and optimization algorithm were proposed, which included warehousing and deck transportation, maintenance service support, and sortie departure. First, an integrated scheduling model of carrier helicopter sortie operation was developed based on the resource and logical restrictions of each stage in order to reduce the duration of the sortie. Then, the problem is abstracted as a resource-constrained project scheduling problem with transition times, and a two-segment genetic-neighborhood search algorithm is designed to solve the problem based on a serial schedule generation scheme. Through simulation experiments conducted on the concentrated sortie cases of 12 shipboard helicopters, the effectiveness of the scheduling model and algorithm in optimizing the sortie process was verified. This significantly reduced the sortie preparation time for the helicopter group. Additionally, it was shown that the entire scheduling is more significantly impacted by decisions made during the maintenance service support phase.