Enlisted Personnel Allocation System

Abstract : The Army Research Institute, with the assistance of the General Research Corporation, is undertaking a project to modernize and improve the way the Army determines the Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) for which an individual should be trained. The Army's present person-job-match (PJM) system has substantial opportunities for improvement. These include assigning more enlistees to jobs that maximize their expected performance and minimize their attrition and holding open selected jobs that can attract high-quality applicants. Essential for realizing these improvements is the ability to look ahead at the supply of applicants and the job training requirements. The authors are developing a prototype decision support system (DSS) that incorporates advanced operations research techniques to improve the Army's person-job-match capabilities. Called the Enlisted Personnel Allocation System (EPAS), it integrates forecasting and large-scale linear optimization. Because of the complexity of this effort, the authors first developed a reduced-scale prototype to evaluate their systems design. The prototype system has been transferred to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) computer facility for more extensive testing and is being enhanced to include additional features based on continuing research and analysis of the PJM process. The present work has provided a sound justification for continuing EPAS research and development. Further experiments should be conducted on current recruiting data for additional refinement of capabilities and assessment of policy alternatives. Plans for porting the EPAS onto an Army computer system for further analysis should proceed.