Objectives Addressing personnel transport demands during naval operations, this study investigates the coordinated multi-ship and multi-aircraft personnel transport mission planning problem.

Methods Firstly, considering constraints including helicopter capacity limits, personnel distribution, and endurance range, a mixed-integer programming model is formulated with the objective of minimizing total mission completion time. Secondly, leveraging the problem characteristics, multiple neighborhood search operators are designed, leading to the proposal of an enhanced optimization framework based on a hierarchical tabu search (HTS) algorithm. Finally, computational experiments are conducted to validate the optimization performance of the algorithm.

Result The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the comparison algorithms in terms of task duration metrics. Specifically, the average completion time is reduced by at least 3.5% compared with VNS and by at least 4.6% compared with SA.

Conclusion This research verifies the robustness and practicality of the HTS algorithm for complex transport scheduling problems, providing theoretical support and engineering reference for combat casualty evacuation decision-making.