Optimization of fixed aviation support resource station configuration for aircraft carrier based on aircraft dispatch mission scheduling

Before the dispatch of the carrier-based aircraft, a series of pre-flight preparation operations need to be completed on the flight deck. Flight deck fixed aviation support resource station configuration has an important impact on operation efficiency and sortie rate. However, the resource station configuration is determined during the aircraft carrier design phase and is rarely modified as required, which may not be suitable for some pre-flight preparation missions. In order to solve the above defects, the joint optimization of flight deck resource station configuration and aircraft carrier pre-flight preparation scheduling is studied in this paper, which is formulated as a two-tier optimization decision-making framework. An improved variable neighborhood search algorithm with four original neighborhood structures is presented. Dispatch mission experiment and algorithm performance comparison experiment are carried out in the computational experiment section. The correlation between the pre-flight preparation time (makespan) and flight deck cabin occupancy percentage is given, and advantages of the proposed algorithm in solving the mathematical model are verified.     

Beam resource scheduling for a VHF-MIMO radar network in low-angle tracking

The low-angle tracking in multipath interference is a challenging problem for the Very High Frequency (VHF) radar. The colocated Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) technique can remedy such a defect. In this paper, a Joint Beam-Target Assignment and Power Allocation (JBTAPA) strategy is proposed for the VHF-MIMO radar network tracking low-angle targets. The core of the JBTAPA strategy is to improve the worst tracking accuracy among multiple targets by assigning appropriate beams to targets and allocating the power resource in each beam using the feedback information in the tracking cycle. Taking into account the transmit multipath and receive multipath, we derive the Cramér-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) on angle estimate, which is then incorporated in the Predicted Conditional CRLB (PC-CRLB). A more accurate and consistent lower bound is provided as the optimization metric since the PC-CRLB is based on the most recently realized measurements. A two-stage-based technique is proposed to solve the JBTAPA problem, which is originally NP-hard. Simulation results verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. The results also imply that the target reflectivity plays one of the important roles in resource allocation.