Minimizing time awaiting training for graduates of the Basic School

Abstract

Graduates of The Basic School often spend longer than necessary waiting for their military occupational schools to start. Excessive waiting by graduates is the result of a scheduling conflict between Basic School graduation dates and the start dates of twenty-one different schools. This classic scheduling problem results in less available manning for the operational forces. The goal of this thesis is to provide a desktop computer model, based on a linear program, that optimally distributes military occupational specialty quotas to all fiscal year Basic School companies and minimizes the time spent waiting by officers between graduation and the start of their occupational school; while also providing maximum equity of opportunity for all officers to seek any of the twenty-one military occupational specialties. The Minimizing rime Awaiting Training model built in this thesis optimally allocate the annual quotas in an efficient and equitable manner using a Pentium II desktop computer in approximately ten seconds. Numerous model runs yielded a total time savings ranging from a high of forty five man years, to a low of twenty man years.