Training Management and Scheduling System for United States Air Force Tactical Fighter Squadrons

摘要

Crewmembers in United States Air Force Tactical Fighter Squadrons (TFS) accomplish a complex combination of flying and ground training to meet peacetime and wartime contingency tasking. Manual scheduling systems used today often result in crewmembers not accomplishing required training or receiving training in an inefficient manner. Flying $20 million supersonic aircraft the consequences can be expensive and fatal. The scheduling problem facing the TFS can be shown to be NP hard. A heuristic is presented which offers a solution to this scheduling problem. A series of transportation subproblems are solved using a primal network simplex code. At each stage, solutions are linked with previous solutions until a schedule is formed or no feasible solution can be found for the remaining jobs. A swap routine then attempts to find a feasible solution if one does not currently exist. The algorithm then continues into an improvement routine in an attempt to find a solution with an increased objective value. This approach was chosen due to a desire to develop a system fast enough to be interactive on a daily basis yet self contained at the squadron level. The results seem promising in providing a typical USAF TFS with training results superior to those accomplished currently.