OPTIMIZED MAINTENANCE SCHEDULING IN SUPPORT OF AT-SEA DETERRENCE

Abstract

The United States counters adversarial threats with submarine-launched fleet ballistic missiles and strategic weapon systems developed, produced, and supported through their lifetime of service by Strategic Systems Programs (SSP). Much of the service support of this fleet occurs at strategic weapons facilities, where analysts balance competing requirements to schedule the modification, maintenance, onloading, offloading, and delivery of missiles and their components. The schedules are created with project management tools that limit productivity of the skilled analysts and in turn the operational effectiveness of the U.S. Navy and its ability to maintain nuclear deterrence. The current use of these tools involves manually organizing data and decisions across spreadsheets, tediously balancing the fleet and manufacturing requirements, inventory, and workload. To help support this process, we wrote out a statement of the basic decision problem addressed by SSP and formulated it as an integer linear programming problem. This model helps complete the data processing and manage the requirements and inventory to produce a feasible, improved schedule that meets the demands of the strategic weapons facilities. This schedule is produced in a manner that requires less manual data manipulation by the analyst, provides the analysts with more visibility for the future, and provides the ability to tackle what-if scenarios. It can be extended to help keep the facilities’ workloads leveled.