The Method of Operational Planning of Group Actions of Aircraft in the "Air Taxi" Mode

The article is devoted to the development of algorithms for operational planning of routes for a group of aircraft (AC). We consider group actions of small and unmanned aircraft in the "air taxi" mode, when there is no regular flight schedule between the points of destination, and requests are received "on call" for flights to points whose composition is unknown in advance and is of a random nature. The multicriteria task of planning a group flight in the "air taxi" mode is being solved. The solution to this problem is proposed using the apparatus of the queuing theory, according to which the system under consideration belongs to the class of multichannel queuing systems with waiting. A method for solving the problem of operational planning of aircraft actions is proposed. An algorithm for group target distribution of new claims between aircraft is developed on the basis of a modified minimax criterion for assigning the nearest aircraft for an object with a maximum service time. The developed algorithm is based on the following four main operations: in the first operation, priority unserved targets are selected according to the criterion of assigning a dynamic priority; in the second operation, the formed list is ranked according to another criterion, taking into account the importance and total distance of each ground object from the aircraft group, in three this operation selects the object with the maximum rank, and for it the task of assigning "own" aircraft is solved according to the third criterion of maximum proximity, in the fourth operation the conditions of non-intersection of the group flight routes are checked. A computer model of the system for servicing requests in the air taxi mode has been developed. The developed model makes it possible to analyze various scheduling algorithms, as well as to determine at each step the number of free claims and the number of free and busy aircraft. A comparison is made between the well-known in the theory of queuing and the proposed minimax approaches. It is shown that, in comparison with the known variants of scheduling in the queuing theory, on the basis of the proposed approach, the optimal number of used aircraft is achieved.

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