Annual Scheduling of Atlantic Fleet Naval Combatants

Employment scheduling is the process whereby U. S. Navy ships, submarines, aircraft and other units are assigned to major operations, exercises, maintenance periods, inspections and other events; the employment schedule directly influences fleet combat readiness. Currently, this process is largely manual requiring several full-time scheduling officers and additional personnel at various levels of management. We introduce an optimization model that automates a substantial part of the employment scheduling problem. The model is formulated as a generalized set partitioning problem and is applied to the annual planning schedule for naval surface combatants of the Atlantic Fleet. For the calendar year 1983, 111 ships engage in 19 primary events yielding a model with 228 constraints and 10,723 binary variables. This model is solved optimally in about 1.6 minutes producing a schedule that is significantly better than the corresponding published schedule. The optimized peacetime employment schedule which has as its objective maximizing combat readiness should always be the goal and guide. U.S. Navy, NWP − 1 He knew the things that were, the things that would be, and the things that had come before. Homer, The Iliad