Enhancing Persistence When Optimally Scheduling Depot-Level Repair Activity for the United States Marine Corps

Abstract

The United States Marine Corps' ability to wage war and its warfighting effectiveness rely heavily on the availability of its tactical ground equipment. The Marine Corps optimizes the warfighting availability of its tactical ground equipment in its depot-level repair plan, which commits $450 million over a six-year horizon. Currently, small changes (for example, budget) to the input to this model produce non-intuitive revisions that are needlessly disruptive. The Marine Corps Materiel Command (MATCOM) recognizes this problem and has asked for enhancement of their current model to include persistent features. We show that turbulence can be reduced at little cost in warfighting availability. We also investigate an approximate, but very fast heuristic in lieu of mathematical optimization to solve this problem. A simple greedy myopic heuristic quickly produces nearly-optimal advice to the depot-level planning problem.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 2003
Accession Number
ADA417704

Entities

People

  • Jonathan A. Drexler

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Ground and Sea Platforms

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Availability
  • Base Closures
  • Basic Programming Language
  • Case Studies
  • Computer Programming
  • Integer Programming
  • Linear Programming
  • Maintenance
  • Marine Corps
  • Mathematical Programming
  • Military Operations
  • Operations Research
  • Optimization
  • Rotation
  • Turbulence
  • United States
  • United States Naval Academy

Readers

  • Life Cycle Cost Analysis
  • Military History / Militaries and War Studies
  • Systems Analysis and Design