Satisfying War-Time Fuel Requirement with a Minimal Tanker Complement

Abstract

The United States Transportation Command (USTC) must ensure that sufficient assets are available to transport the war-time requirements of Petroleum, Oil and Lubrication (POL) for the military. To be confident that sufficient assets exist to transport POL, USTC must know the number of tankers required. The Mobility Division of the Logistics Directorate of the Joint Staff (J4-MOB) uses a simulation model, the Model for Intertheater Deployment by Air and Sea (MIDAS), to determine the required number of tankers. MIDAS' use is problematic since many runs may be needed, each run is manpower-intensive, and results do not necessarily define the minimum number of tankers. This thesis couples a schedule generator and an integer linear programming (ILP) model to determine the minimum number of tankers to satisfy war-time POL requirements. Solving a realistic scenario provided by J4-MOB (spanning 75 days with 92 available tankers), the ILP selects 19 tankers, one-third the number initially chosen by MIDAS. Using the ILP's recommended schedules, MIDAS confirms the ILP's solution. These results show that the schedule generator and the ILP can assist J4-MOB.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 01, 1997
Accession Number
ADA341493

Entities

People

  • Kent A. Michaelis

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Ground and Sea Platforms

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Central Processing Units
  • Computer Programming
  • Computers
  • Deployment
  • Integer Programming
  • Linear Programming
  • Logistics
  • Mathematical Programming
  • National Security
  • Operations Research
  • Optimization
  • Petroleum
  • Simulations
  • Tanker Aircraft
  • United States
  • United States Transportation Command

Readers

  • Aerospace Test and Evaluation
  • Aerospace logistics and air mobility.
  • Computational Modeling and Simulation