A simulation tool for the duties of computer specialist non-commissioned officers on a Turkish Air Force Base

Abstract

Staff assignment is one of the major problems in many lines of business. Knowing that the human being is one of the most expensive and demanding resources, efficient personnel employing becomes significant. Simulation techniques can help accomplish effective staff assignments. The aim of this thesis is to create a simulation tool by using a prototypical model of the computer system specialist non-commissioned officers' jobs on a Turkish Air Force Base, and to identify the effective factors on computer specialist shortage problem. This aim is accomplished by using event graph and discrete event simulation techniques for modeling purposes, and Simkit and Viskit for implementing the created model into simulation code. After evaluating the simulation results from an experiment involving fifteen input factors, it was concluded that the staff shortage problem can be addressed by using this study after updating the parameters used in the model to reflect the most recent distributions. On the other hand, increasing the number of personnel is not the only solution for addressing the problem. There are some other ways suggested by the study to improve the measure of effectiveness values, such as increasing the number of cars that are assigned to repair personnel, reducing logistic delay times, or increasing the inter-arrival times for computer and network failures. There are different setups or combinations of the factors that are capable of solving the staff shortage problem, and the most cost effective one can be decided after doing a trade-off analysis.