Enhancing persistence when optimally scheduling depot-level repair activity for the United States Marine Corps

Abstract

The United States Marine Corps' ability to wage war and its warfighting effectiveness rely heavily on the availability of its tactical ground equipment. The Marine Corps optimizes the warfighting availability of its tactical ground equipment in its depot-level repair plan, which commits $450 million over a six-year horizon. Currently, small changes (for example, budget) to the input to this model produce non-intuitive revisions that are needlessly disruptive. The Marine Corps Materiel Command (MATCOM) recognizes this problem and has asked for enhancement of their current model to include persistent features. We show that turbulence can be reduced at little cost in warfighting availability. We also investigate an approximate, but very fast heuristic in lieu of mathematical optimization to solve this problem. A simple greedy myopic heuristic quickly produces nearly-optimal advice to the depot-level planning problem.