Date of Award

3-22-2018

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Operations Research

Department

Department of Operational Sciences

First Advisor

Jeffery D. Weir, PhD

Abstract

Presently, the 57th Wing Scheduler at Nellis AFB schedules daily mission requests to the Nevada Test and Training Range (NTTR) airspace manually. The process is time consuming and may lead to suboptimal range resource allocations. The goal of this study is to provide the scheduler with an automated scheduling approach that will improve range scheduling efficiency. The tool developed uses range request data from units at Nellis AFB to produce daily mission schedules for a month long scheduling horizon with Microsoft VBA code and a commercial Integer Program (IP) solver. Under our current understanding of scheduler priorities, we formulate the problem with three different sets of objective function coefficients to maximize the utility of the schedules. We then analyze the differences in the schedules produced from a test data set comprised of requests from May 2017. Based on our analysis and results from testing, we recommend that the 57th Wing Scheduler employ one of our priority- based formulations to find fast and good feasible starting solutions to their monthly schedule build. This study demonstrates that using an IP approach to scheduling missions to the NTTR is feasible and has utility to the scheduling organization.

AFIT Designator

AFIT-ENS-MS-18-M-138

DTIC Accession Number

AD1056371

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