Manned combat aerial vehicles (MCAVs), and unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) together form a cooperative engagement system to carry out operational mission, which will be a new air engagement style in the near future. On the basis of analyzing the structure of the MCAV/UCAV cooperative engagement system, this paper divides the unique system into three hierarchical levels, respectively, i.e., mission level, task-cluster level and task level. To solve the formation and adjustment problem of

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... the latter two levels, three corresponding mathematical models are established. To solve these models, three algorithms called quantum artificial bee colony (QABC) algorithm, greedy strategy (GS) and two-stage greedy strategy (TSGS) are proposed. Finally, a series of simulation experiments are designed to verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed algorithms. Keywords: manned combat aerial vehicle (MCAV), unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV), cooperative engagement system, quantum artificial bee colony (QABC), greedy strategy (GS), twostage greedy strategy (TSGS).