Control allocation for a class of morphing aircraft with integer constraints based on Lévy flight

Aiming at tracking control of a class of innovative control effector (ICE) aircraft with distributed arrays of actuators, this paper proposes a control allocation scheme based on the Lévy flight. Different from the conventional aircraft control allocation problem, the particular characteristic of actuators makes the actuator control command totally subject to integer constraints. In order to tackle this problem, first, the control allocation problem is described as an integer programming problem with two desired objectives. Then considering the requirement of real-time, a metaheuristic algorithm based on the Levy flight is introduced to tackling this problem. In order to improve the searching efficiency, several targeted and heuristic strategies including variable step length and inherited population initialization according to feedback and so on are designed. Moreover, to prevent the incertitude of the metaheuristic algorithm and ensure the flight stability, a guaranteed control strategy is designed. Finally, a time-varying simulation model is introduced to verifying the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. The contrastive simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme achieves superior tracking performance with appropriate actuator dynamics and computational time, and the improvements for efficiency are active and the parameter settings are reasonable.