Algorithms for mission assignment and sequencing problems in a military aviation unit

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on operations planning problems arising in the army aviation units of Korea. There are two types of aviation units in the army, assault units and mobility units. An assault unit performs missions of attacking enemy’s aircrafts, armors and combat forces and protecting friendly units including mobility aviation units, while a mobility aviation unit conducts transportation missions such as maneuvering infantry forces to decisive areas against enemy and/or moving ammunitions and equipments to a place where they are needed. In this study, we focus on scheduling problems in mobility aviation units. As can be seen from the recent wars, mobility aviation units have played important roles to support ground combat forces by supplying war materials. However, since there are a limited number of aviation units and aircrafts in each unit, it is required to develop methodologies to complete all given missions as early as possible within the limited resources. First, we consider a problem which is to assign the flight missions to the aircrafts and schedule these assigned missions on each aircraft with the objective of minimizing makespan, i.e., the time all missions have been completed. Sequence-dependent setup times are required between the missions, and multiple aircrafts may be needed for a mission if work required for the mission exceeds the capacity of an aircraft, but the aircrafts assigned to the same mission should start the mission simultaneously. We develop two methods to convert a sequence of (partial) missions to a (partial) schedule for the problem. Based on the converting methods, we develop several heuristic algorithms for the problem which are composed of two-step procedures: obtaining an initial sequence (solution) of missions in the first step and improving the solution in the second step. Secondly, we consider a situation in which the flight missions are already allocated to each pilot (aircraft) based on pilots’ flight skill, exp...