Realigning the U.S. Navy Recruiting Command

Abstract

This thesis addresses two problems in aligning the recruiting structure for Navy Recruiting Command. The first problem involves two decisions affecting recruiting stations within a single recruiting district: which stations should remain open and how many recruiters should be assigned to each open station? The second problem is to decide how many recruiters and stations each district should have. The first problem is formulated as a nonlinear mixed integer programming problem. To obtain a solution with readily available software, the problem is decomposed into four subproblems that are solved sequentially. This decomposition approach is empirically shown to yield near optimal solutions for problems of varied sizes. The second problem is formulated as a nonlinear resource allocation problem in which the objective function is not expressible in closed form. To efficiently solve this problem, the function is approximated in a piecewise linear fashion using the results from the first problem. To illustrate the applications of these optimization models, solutions were obtained for Navy Recruiting District Boston and Navy Recruiting Area 1, which consists of Albany, Boston, Buffalo, New York, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and New Jersey districts.