Objectives Carrier-based aircraft constitute the core combat capability of an aircraft carrier, and their sortie rate is a key indicator for evaluating the carrier's operational effectiveness. Under conditions of limited deck space and constrained support resources, developing efficient and feasible flight plans for carrier-based aircraft remains a critical challenge for improving sortie efficiency and overall combat capability. Taking the operational environment of Nimitz-class aircraft carriers as the research context, this study proposes a hierarchical human-in-the-loop decision-making method to enable efficient and coordinated optimization of sortie and recovery sequences, as well as the ordering of support operations for carrier-based aircraft.
Methods A priority ranking mechanism integrating multiple key indicators was first developed to comprehensively evaluate the operational status of carrier-based aircraft as well as the urgency and importance of their support operations. Building upon this, a hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithm was designed by incorporating the structural characteristics of both the aircraft layer and the support operation layer, enabling joint optimization of aircraft execution sequences and support task scheduling, thereby achieving globally efficient decision-making. To further enhance decision quality, a commander feedback mechanism was introduced, along with a dynamic switching function to enable adaptive collaboration between the intelligent agent and the human commander. Extensive comparative experiments were conducted in a simulated Nimitz-class aircraft carrier environment.
Results Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method reduces the total completion time and waiting time of support operations by an average of 20.9% and 31.2%, respectively, compared with baseline algorithms, thereby validating its effectiveness and practical value in carrier-based aircraft flight planning decision-making.
Conclusions The findings of this study provide valuable insights for decision support in multi-wave flight planning of carrier-based aircraft.
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