OPTIMIZING TRAINING EVENT SCHEDULES AT NAVAL AIR STATION KINGSVILLE

VT-22, located at Naval Air Station Kingsville, is a U.S. Navy and Marine Corps Strike and E-2/C-2 training squadron. At VT-22, naval instructor pilots with fleet experience train student aviators through a substantial and challenging syllabus. Schedulers at VT-22 create each day’s schedule manually using a laborious process that leaves little time to explore options or consider a time horizon beyond one day. This thesis develops, implements, and reports on the Training Event Scheduling Tool (TEST), an integer linear program that prescribes hourly assignments of classroom events, simulator events, and flight events to each student and each instructor. TEST streamlines scheduling using optimization to simultaneously create daily schedules for a horizon of up to one week. We compare TEST schedules with those created manually for a typical week and find that TEST schedules up to 32% more events. TEST solution time is less than 10 minutes for a single day’s schedule, allowing the heretofore unavailable opportunity to quickly explore schedule options and respond to changing requirements.http://archive.org/details/optimizingtraini1094564027Outstanding ThesisEnsign, United States NavyApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited