An Aerial Refueling Optimization Model Applied to Strategic Airlift

摘要

With the advent of strategic airlift in-flight refueling, the role of strategic mobility in supporting our national policy has taken on new dimensions. Airlift of important military equipment to any part of the world is no longer dependent on enroute bases for refueling. Also, our response time to any contingency far from home can now be measured in terms of hours instead of days. This increased demand on our limited aerial refueling resources, plus the high cost and doubtful availability of jet fuel, require that any development using aerial refueling be done as efficiently as possible. The main objective of this study is to define and develop an operationally usable optimization model that will, given airlifter route of flight, take off fuel and gross weight, enroute wind factors, tanker departure bases, and available enroute diversion bases, determine the aerial refueling points, fuel offload, tanker departure bases to minimize total fuel consumed by both air-lifter and tanker. The key to this study is the requirement that the model be operationally usable. Therefore, the model is designed to allow input of any mission scenario using geographic coordinates. (Author)