Effect Oriented Planning in Military Mission Support Systems : Models and Heuristic Approaches

Abstract: Today there are many aspects of model based planning, probably much more than for just 20 years ago. Today data is not the problem, data is everywhere, but the big issue is to understand how to gain advantage of data in decision making - a growing focus is now on modeling!This work is devoted to this task and can be seen as a three part study. First a general problem of multi-resource routing with sequence dependent costs is studied both in terms of models, as well as the development of methods to solve this class of problems efficiently. Sequence dependent costs among resources arise in situations where for instance, one resource is allocated to a task which influence another task and makes that easier in the sense that it can be conducted to a lower cost or shorter time or some other measured effort. This is a useful building block in military decision making when making plans for troops, attacks or missions in general.The next part is founded by Vinnova via the research project “Effect Oriented Planning in Dynamic Scenarios”, and deals with a military ground attack problem with simultaneous attacks against a plurality of targets. This part deals with the difficulties of the attacker-defender problem which is modeled in a Nonlinear Mixed Integer Programming formulation. Suggestions are given how to refine and transform this into robust solution methods.The last part, also included in the Vinnova research project, deals with mission support modeling of Air to Ground missions including multiple aircrafts and a plurality of targets. In this case, sequencing is most important and a strong effort has been put in the understanding and transformation of the problem into models and methods.In these last two parts implementations of models and heuristics as well as computer runs and simulations, originates from the work in [19] and [20] which has been an invaluable contribution to this work.The results are very promising where fast execution and sufficient planning accuracy have drawn the attention as a foundation for future work and research in model based decision making applicable to industry needs and ambitions.