A Strategic Approach to Optimizing the U.S. Army's Aeromedical Evacuation System in Afghanistan
Abstract
According to current force health protection policy, the U.S. Army's Health Service Support system is designed to maintain a healthy force and to conserve combat strength of deployed soldiers. Specifically, this system remains particularly effective by employing standardized aeromedical evacuation assets and providing a responsive field-sited medical treatment facility for the wounded soldiers evacuated from the battlefield. Since the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom, military commanders have faced a significant combinatorial challenge integrating limited air evacuation assets into a fully-functional, comprehensive system for the entire combat theatre. This work describes a robust, multi-criteria decision analysis methodology using a scenario-based, stochastic optimization goal programming model that U.S. Army medical planners can use as a strategic and tactical aeromedical evacuation asset planning tool to help bolster and improve the current air evacuation system in Afghanistan. Specifically, this model optimizes over a set of expected scenarios with stochastically-determined casualty locations to emplace the minimum number of helicopters at each medical treatment facility necessary to maximize the coverage of the theatre-wide casualty demand and the probability of meeting that demand, while minimizing the maximal medical treatment facility evacuation site total vulnerability to enemy attack.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jul 10, 2009
- Accession Number
- ADA545083
Entities
People
- Nathaniel D Bastian
Organizations
- Maastricht University