Abstract: Long-range transfer boom aerial refueling can significantly enhance the range and sustained operational capability of transport aircraft formations, and research on task assignment methods is of great importance for improving transportation efficiency and operational safety. To address the issues of strong coupling between refueling zone planning and tanker scheduling, as well as the significant heterogeneity in refueling demands among receiver aircraft within a formation, a refueling task demand model incorporating priority ordering of receiver aircraft is developed. With the objectives of minimizing additional refueling time, tanker scheduling cost, and refueling zone risk coefficient, a task assignment model considering route constraints is developed. By introducing a position update strategy based on the hybrid conflict–cooperative mechanism and an archive maintenance strategy based on elite preservation and dynamic crowding distance, an improved multi-objective gray wolf optimization algorithm based on the hybrid conflict–cooperative mechanism is proposed for aerial refueling task assignment and validated through simulations. Simulation results demonstrate that, under different parameters and scenarios, the proposed method can obtain high-quality task assignment solutions, verifying its feasibility and effectiveness. Compared with the existing sequential task allocation method, the proposed method reduces the overall fitness value by 11.0%, demonstrating its effectiveness and superiority. Compared with other algorithms, the new algorithm reduces the overall fitness value by 10.9% and shortens the average time to obtain the optimal solution by 41%, indicating strong optimization performance.

Key words: long-range transfer, boom aerial refueling, task assignment, multi-objective optimization, gray wolf optimization