AI-based integrated scheduling of production and transportation operations within military supply chains

Abstract

Maintaining the military weapon systems requires that spare parts of military equipment are available where and when they are needed. We focus on integrated demand-responsive scheduling of operations within two-echelon military supply chains consisting of production and transportation operations. Integration across these operations is achieved by introducing an additional intermediary module into the mathematical model which is solved by a new two-level artificial-intelligence (AI)-based algorithm. In order to carry out this task we introduce and analyze two performance measures: time of response and military effectiveness. A new solution method based on integer programming techniques in combination with AI-based heuristic search is derived. The discrete-event simulation tool - ARENA 11.0, is used to implement the integrated scheduling method. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.