Optimally funding Army Installation repair and maintenance activities

Abstract

The Army's Assistant Chief of Staff for Installation Management (ACSIM) allocated over $4.862 Billion in 1995 to over 200 Army installations for Repair and Maintenance Activities (RPMA). However, this allocation and those of the recent past have historically covered only 40 to 70 percent of total requirements. In response, ACSIM developed an efficient and defensible management paradigm called Infrastructure Decision Architecture (IDA). The IDA contains a model called the Decision Support Tool (DST) that projects future infrastructure status given a proposed six year budget, the current infrastructure status, a funding hierarchy, and an infrastructure priority. This thesis develops a linear program incorporating the goals of the IDA into an optimization based decision support system, completing the DST. This thesis affords ACSIM decision makers the following abilities: a projection of the optimal inventory status resulting from a given budget; the six year annual allocation policy to obtain the optimal benefit; the ability to defend budget needs concerning desired infrastructure status in the procurement cycle; and the ability to conduct "what ifs" on different budget strategies and infrastructure end States. Successful model runs for eleven different Major Commands using Fiscal Year 1996 data resulted in installation infrastructure status projections and annual funding consistent with ACSIM priorities.