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<p>The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) is a naval combatant designed to operate in the littoral regions. Twenty-four LCSs will be built over the next five years employing a crew rotation concept where three crews rotate between two ships. During the construction period, an experienced crew must be assigned, which disrupts the desired crew rotation in ships already built. This thesis develops LCS Scheduler (LCSS), a mathematical optimization model using a mixed-integer, linear program (MIP) to aid in assigning LCS crews to LCS ships. LCSS’s objective is to minimize the penalty associated with assigning crews outside of their desired ship pairing and/or extending them beyond four months in a phase. Results are compared based on solve time and penalty value. The MIP solution has the best quality. Yet, even for a shorter-than-desired time horizon, it takes many hours of computation. Rolling horizon is a heuristic approach that produces a full, long-term schedule in under an hour but requires manual modifications to misaligned crews. Fix-and-relax is a more-elaborate heuristic with potential benefits to crew alignment for longer-range schedules. The planner must balance solve time and solution quality when determining the approach to LCSS.
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<br>Subjects: Optimization; integer programming; schedule; littoral combat ship</div>
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Fitzsimmons, Van R.</div>
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