Annual scheduling of Atlantic Fleet Naval Combatants

Employment scheduling is the task of assigning ships to fullfil U.S. Navy commitments at home and abroad. Commitments are events, with fixed start and completion dates, that require specified ship resources. The objective of the employment schedule is to satisfy all event requirements while providing an equitable rotation of ships and an even distribution of workload. This study provides a mathematical programming model to assist employment scheduling. A set covering formulation of the scheduling problem minimizes deviations from an "ideal" schedule, developed in terms of navy scheduling policy, while satisfying event requirements. An efficient column generation program, using problem-specific column reduction techniques, produces a moderate sized problem which is then solved as an integer program. The model is tested using data from the 1983 Atlantic Fleet schedule for carriers and surface combatants. The data involving 111 ships, 19 major events, 73 separate ship-type requirements, and 44 force weapon system capability requirements yields a set covering problem with 10,723 variables and 228 constraints. This problem is solved on an IBM 3033 AP in 84 seconds of CPU time.http://archive.org/details/annualscheduling00goodLieutenant, United States NavyApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited