An Extended Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Model for Flight Deck Scheduling with Priority, Parallel Operations, and Sequence Flexibility

Abstract

Efficient scheduling for the supporting operations of aircrafts in flight deck is critical to the aircraft carrier, and even several seconds’ improvement may lead to totally converse outcome of a battle. In the paper, we ameliorate the supporting operations of carrier-based aircrafts and investigate three simultaneous operation relationships during the supporting process, including precedence constraints, parallel operations, and sequence flexibility. Furthermore, multifunctional aircrafts have to take off synergistically and participate in a combat cooperatively. However, their takeoff order must be restrictively prioritized during the scheduling period accorded by certain operational regulations. To efficiently prioritize the takeoff order while minimizing the total time budget on the whole takeoff duration, we propose a novel mixed integer liner programming formulation (MILP) for the flight deck scheduling problem. Motivated by the hardness of MILP, we design an improved differential evolution algorithm combined with typical local search strategies to improve computational efficiency. We numerically compare the performance of our algorithm with the classical genetic algorithm and normal differential evolution algorithm and the results show that our algorithm obtains better scheduling schemes that can meet both the operational relations and the takeoff priority requirements.

An Imperialist Competitive Algorithm for a Real-World Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem

“…Based on experiments we find out that the best parameters for the ICA applied for the EFJSP are G = 1000, I = 100, δ = [200, 500], and α = [5,15]. For the experiments involving the instances Mk01,...Mk05, Mk07,...,Mk09, YFJSP ≤ 10, and DAFJS ≤ 10 we used δ = [250], α = [5]; for the instances Mk06, Mk10, YFJS > 10, and DAFJSP > 10 we used δ = [400], α = [10]. Supplemental numerical results, charts, and the instances are provided at https://willtl.github.io/etfa2018/.…”

“…Vilcot and Billaut [8] considered a class of instances where each operation in a job can have more than one predecessor, but at most one direct successor. Similarly, Yu et al [10] considered a scheduling problem with parallel operations for flight deck simulations considering G-jobs and Y-jobs. Birgin et al [1] considered both types of jobs with parallel operations and proposed a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model which allows the precedence between operations of a job to be given by an arbitrary directed acyclic graph (DAG) rather than a linear order.…”

“…We propose a new representation to improve the searching capabilities of the algorithm. Motivated by the fact that it is difficult to achieve an optimal solution for medium and real size problems with mathematical modeling due to its high computational complexity [10], we design an improved imperialist competitive algorithm to find "good enough" solutions in an acceptable time for large-sized instances. In order to compare the ICA with other methods, we implemented our proposed solution representation with a genetic algorithm (GA), and a continuous firefly algorithm (FA).…”

A Proactive Robust Scheduling Method for Aircraft Carrier Flight Deck Operations with Stochastic Durations

“…Dastidar and Frazzoli [7] took the key support equipment as the path nodes and constructed a queueing network model of the flight deck operations. Yu et al [8] established an extended flexible job shop scheduling model for flight deck scheduling considering the serial and parallel precedence relations between operations. Shi et al [9] regarded the support groups as multistage machines, and the hybrid flow shop scheduling model was applied.…”

A Dynamic Scheduling Method for Carrier Aircraft Support Operation under Uncertain Conditions Based on Rolling Horizon Strategy

“…Feng Qiang [19] proposed a multi-agent based fleet maintenance personnel configuration method to solve the mission-oriented aircraft fleet maintenance personnel configuration problem. Lianfei Yu [20] viewed the flight deck scheduling problem as an extension of the flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP), and designed an improved differential evolution algorithm (IDE) to improve the computational efficiency. Our research team has also published some relevant papers for the carrier aircraft scheduling problem including the constraints in the scheduling [21], the multi-objective integrated supporting scheduling model, and the intelligence algorithm to solve this problem [22,23].…”