IPOWER OPERATIONAL ANALYSIS: DISCRETE EVENT SIMULATION

This thesis uses discrete event simulation and statistical methods to further analyze the U.S. Marine Corps Expeditionary Energy Office’s IPOWER tool, which is currently focused on analysis of squad-level operations and scales the simulation to the platoon level. The results of this work show that there is significant variability when analyzing the mission parameters that have the largest impact on energy usage. The model developed by this thesis incorporates variability into the operator’s decision, allowing the operator to see a distribution of possible outcomes, which represents the stochastic nature of military operations in more detail than is possible using IPOWER. This allows the operator to assume a level of risk, how much of the distribution to include, in determining the number of batteries required to complete the mission. It was determined that radio usage during the attack/intel phase and the radio’s initial battery capacity are the most significant factors in all prediction models. The results of this thesis can help to improve the Marine Corps’ management of the War Reserve Materiel Program, logistics planning for operations that require high energy demands, and wargame analysis.Lieutenant, United States NavyApproved for public release. distribution is unlimite