Maritime Prepositioning Force (MPF) throughput analysis of a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) Slice offload

Abstract

This thesis describes the design and employment of a general transportation and distribution simulation toolbox and an extension to that toolbox used to model the instream offload of a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) Slice of a Maritime Prepositioning Force (MPF). The Simulated Mobility Modeling and Analysis Toolbox (SMMAT) is a toolbox of object oriented modules written in M0DSIM II by faculty and students, including the author, of the Naval Postgraduate School for transportation and distribution modeling. The MEU Slice offload model is built as an extension to SMMAT, with itself being easily extendible to model other aspects of MPF operations. The objective of this thesis was twofold, (1) to build SMMAT and demonstrate its feasibility as a toolbox, and (2) to determine which of four asset distribution setups ashore, at varying levels of equipment reliability, will allow for the fastest offload and throughput of the MEU slice. This thesis successfully demonstrated SMMAT's usefulness as a transportation and distribution simulation toolbox, and the MEU Slice study indicates that no one distribution setup ashore is statistically faster than any other one