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<p>The United States Navy continually deals with the challenges involved with the assignment of limited resources to  address numerous and dispersed critical missions. The Navy's continued pursuit of decision aids to answer this problem and the  ongoing critical maritime operations in the western pacific and Arabian seas demonstrate the importance of this issue. How do  navy staffs assign surface and subsurface combatants to areas and missions? The available ships may be inbound or outbound to  the maritime theater, they may already be assigned to other missions in different regions, or may require transit and off station time  before they can cover a particular mission. In planning major operations there are usually more missions than can be covered by  available Navy combatants; therefore, it is likely that no ship will be assigned to low-priority missions, and deciding which higherpriority  missions to cover at any time involves complicated tradeoffs. This planning problem is compounded by the fact that  multiple alternatives are required by flee commanders and Joint Force Maritime Component Commanders (JFMCCs) who want to  maximize the effectiveness of their maritime forces while avoiding excessive risk and identifying gaps in mission coverage. This  thesis develops a decision support tool, the Navy Mission Planner (NMP), which rapidly selects employment schedules for Navy  combatants to meet the requirements above. We illustrate how NMP identifies optimal coverage of maritime missions in a theater  with a notional, unclassified Korean peninsula scenario with 11 ships, 65 missions and 24 user defined maritime regions, on a  desktop PC. NMP gives decision makers the ability to adjust courses of action by manipulating the time horizon, optimality  criterion, mission values, mission dependencies, and ships available, and provides valuable insight into which missions will and, more  importantly, will not be covered for any set of mission priorities.
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<br>Subjects: Integer programming; Programming (Mathematics); Sea control</div>
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Dugan, Kevin C.</div>
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