Analyzing the Effects of Airfield Resources on Airlift Capacity

摘要

Airlift capacity-the number of passengers and the number of tons of cargo that can be delivered to a specific location in a specific period of time-depends on the characteristics of (a) the cargoes to be delivered, (b) the airfields and the routes linking the cargo originations with the cargo destinations, (c) the ground resources at the airfields supporting the air assets, and (d) the air assets-i.e., the aircraft and the aircrews flying those routes. The major mobility studies performed by and for the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) in the 1980s focused on the cargoes, the routes, and the air assets. In the 1990s the focus was expanded to include at least limited consideration of the en route, off-load, and recovery airfields. The air-mobility model of choice has become MASS (Mobility Analysis Support System), a large-scale simulation created and operated by the Air Force's Air Mobility Command (AMC). Ground resources are not modeled but are input as constraints to the airlift model. More recently a series of developments has led to the creation of NRMO (the Naval Postgraduate School/RAND Mobility Optimization), a large-scale linear-programming model of military airlift, and ACE (Airfield Capacity Estimator), a relatively high-resolution model of airfield resources and operations. This study demonstrates the combined use of the ACE and NRMO models to improve and facilitate the analysis of the effects of airfield resources on airlift performance.