Objectives  The sortie generation capacity is an important index of the operational capability of an aircraft carrier and largely determined by the support operation scheduling of the carrier-based aircraft. Therefore a good scheduling of carrier-based aircrafts on the deck can effectively improve the operational capability of aircraft carrier.

  Methods  This paper establishes the operation scheduling module by converting the carrier-based aircraft support operation scheduling into job-shop scheduling problem. And through improvement of initial solution, search strategy and tabu list length, an improved tabu search algorithm is proposed to solve the model, with the purpose of minimizing the makespan.

  Results  The simulation test results show that the improved tabu search algorithm can solve the carrier-based aircraft support operation scheduling problem effectively, and it is better than the traditional tabu search algorithm in terms of speed calculation and result optimization.

  Conclusions  The proposed algorithm provides an effective way to solve the carrier-based aircraft support operation scheduling problem.