An Improved Heuristic for Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Crew Scheduling.
Abstract
Creating monthly schedules for missile crews is a complex and time consuming problem. Thousands of events must be scheduled for several hundred missile officers. The rules and regulations governing the problem are numerous, and there are currently no established measures for missile crew schedules. The scheduling software currently available only schedules a fraction of the events. The objectives of this research were to create a rule based heuristic which could quickly produce feasible or near-feasible schedules, to make the scheduling process paperless, and to develop possible measures of effectiveness for missile crew schedules. The research was successful in each of these areas. Schedules which comply with all rules and regulations were generated by the heuristic. From 95 to 100 percent of the required events were scheduled. The heuristic required from five to 40 seconds to create a schedule using hardware available at a missile wing. Spreadsheets were used to preprocess the data before it was input to the heuristic. This approach made the process paperless. Eight potential objectives which were previously not used as quality measures for missile crew schedules were obtained. These objectives along with those contained in regulations are supported by the rule based heuristic.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 1994
- Accession Number
- ADA289473
Entities
People
- Michael D. Shirley Jr
Organizations
- Air Force Institute of Technology