Cooperative Carrier Aircraft Support Operation Scheduling via Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Hongjie HAO, Xueqin Zhang, Yuan Chi, Rongxin Gao, Anke Xie, Mingliang Xu · 2023
Carrier Aircraft support operation is an important component of the carrier aviation support system, and its efficiency is closely related to the aircraft sortie rate. However, the carrier deck faces significant challenges such as limited space, scarce resources and constantly changing environmental conditions. These factors have a profound impact on the aircraft support operations, particularly in complex scenarios, requiring careful and rational scheduling. To solve above problems, we propose a collaborative fast scheduling framework for Multi-Agent support operations, which is based on a distributed partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP) model. Within this framework, we develop a dynamic scheduling algorithm based on centralized training with decentralized execution framework (CTDE). To evaluate the performance of our approach, we establish a simulation environment for aircraft scheduling and compare our algorithm’s performance with VDN and QMIX in various carrier aircraft scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms others in terms of both training efficiency and scheduling quality.