A column generation technique for a crisis deployment planning problem.

Abstract

This study is concerned with the problem of constructing an optimal military deployment plan for sealift assets during a period of conflict. The deployment problem is formulated as a set-partitioning optimization problem with a minimax objective. An algorithm for solving this problem is presented and it is based on solving a sequence of related, but simpler, linear programming problems by the column generation technique. The results of the model are ship schedules to meet the cargo requirements of the deployment plan in a minimum amount of time. Various implementation strategies are discussed as well as the occurrence of integer solutions. In addition, computational experiments for several small to medium size examples are presented.