Aerial Refueling Route Planning Optimization Research

Air-refueling is the process which requires the tanker aircraft to make oil supply for the deploying aircraft during the journey without landing. In today’s world, the ability to deploy aircraft, supplies, and manpower is an essential tenet to military power. Often, the deployment distance will be outside the range of the aircraft. This is usually overcome through the use of aerial refueling. Sometimes, more than one refueling will be required. Therefore, the successful use of aerial refueling technology is a prerequisite for the implementation of the remote combat tasks, which can increase the range and combat radius of the combat aircraft, and extend its flying time. The capability of air-refueling is more and more important to the air force of different nations. Journey planning is a core of air refueling and its aim is to develop indicators of concern under the premise that satisfy the constraints to achieve the optimal route, such as the total fuel consumption, the flight distance of the deploying aircraft and safety of air-traffic considering the influence of the allocation of war zones and the influence of weather. The complexity of air refueling leads to the complexity of journey planning. Some problems such as how to solve the model using algorithms and how to effectively solve it are very important theoretically and practically and will be useful to the construction of modern military in China.Under the systematic analysis of air refueling problem, a journey-planning model is constructed for the deploying aircraft refueling twice in round-trip. This model considers the total fuel consumption and the flight distance of the deploying aircraft. This is obviously a larger scale, with a constrained non-linear decision problem. Theory and practice show that the use of traditional optimization methods to solve the optimization of decision-making problems can not be globally optimal, the results too sensitive to the starting point for the optimization problem. GA (Genetic Algorithm) is based on natural selection and genetic mechanism, which is an algorithm with characteristics of global optimization and parallelism. It makes up defects of traditional optimization methods. Therefore, based on the journey-planning model, GA is used to solve air refueling journey planning problem. Optimization calculations show that the mathematical model of the journey planning is correct and reasonable, the genetic algorithm for aerial refueling journey planning is efficient and feasible.