| Sensitivity analysis in military deployment planning is an important function given the high-dollar and long term nature of decisions that address the nation's strategic mobility needs. To perform this, planners need fast, personal computer-based tools for scheduling the deployment of military units around the world. In this research, a deployment of military units is formatted as a job shop scheduling problem in which items of unit equipment are jobs moving between air/seaports (factories) on planes and ships (batch processors). The jobs are scheduled for movement using an application of the Virtual Factory, a job shop scheduling system developed at North Carolina State University which is proven to solve large problems to near-optimality very quickly. A decision support model, the Deployment Scheduling Analysis Tool builds the deployment problem through a graphic user interface, invokes the Virtual Factory scheduling procedure and provides meaningful output in the form of reports and graphics.; A limitation built into some current deployment analysis tools is the need to fix the allocation of planes and ships to specific routes for the duration of the deployment. The problem of allocating transportation assets when and where needed is formulated in this research as a mixed integer program. A linear programming-based heuristic procedure provides solutions very close to those of integer program solvers in a fraction of the time. Work is ongoing to incorporate this asset allocation model into an existing deployment analysis tool used by the military, the Deployment Analysis Network Tool Enhanced (DANTE). |
