Optimization of Fleet Storage and Retrieval and Deck Transfer Scheduling on Carrier-Based Platforms

The storage and retrieval of carrier-based aircraft, along with deck transfer scheduling, is a critical factor affecting the sustained combat capability of aircraft carriers. To address the strongly coupled scheduling problem involving aircraft configuration, spatial occupation, and operational timing during cross-domain aircraft transfer, this paper establishes an optimization model that minimizes three objectives: total transfer time, frequency of configuration changes, and load variance among towing teams. Given the discrete combinatorial nature of the model, a Discrete Hybrid Multi-Strategy Grey Wolf Optimizer (DS-GWO) is proposed. Priority-based encoding is adopted to map continuous search spaces onto discrete solution domains. A global alpha wolf guidance strategy is introduced to preserve historically optimal information, dynamic joint mutation is employed to maintain population diversity, and a configuration-adaptive local search strategy is developed to resolve spatial conflicts through configuration reconfiguration without altering the transfer sequence. Simulation results show that DS-GWO consistently outperforms baseline algorithms across all test scenarios, achieving a maximum improvement of 29.6%, thereby confirming the effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm.