Mission planning for ship-helicopter group wave launch and recovery oriented to mission time windows

The ship-helicopter launch and recovery capability is a core element supporting the diversified missions of amphibious ships. To enhance the timeliness and flexibility of helicopter group operations under deck resource constraints, this study investigates mission planning for multi-pattern helicopter launch and recovery tasks. Firstly, based on analyzing typical helicopter operation patterns and deck workflows for amphibious ships, a flexible operational concept is proposed. The wave-based launch and recovery operations are refined into a six-phase closed-loop process comprising pre-launch transportation, maintenance support, launch departure, mission flight, recovery approach, and post-recovery transportation. By integrating operational logic, spatial-resource constraints, mission time window requirements, and deck operation time optimization objectives, a nonlinear integer programming model for multi-wave helicopter group operations is established. To solve this model, a competitive particle swarm optimization algorithm with hybrid elite mutation strategy is developed, employing three-segment random number encoding and task-decoupled dual-chain serial decoding for coordinated optimization of task sequences and resource allocation. Finally, Simulation experiments on three operation patterns, concentrated, continuous, and flexible, validate the effectiveness of the model and algorithm in optimizing multi-wave launch/recovery missions. Furthermore, comparative experiments under continuous operation pattern with constrained ship support capacity and mission flight duration analyze the impacts of task grouping and wave configuration on operational efficiency, providing targeted references for practical applications.