A simulation model for military deployment

Abstract

The Deployment Planning Problem (DPP) for military units may in general be defined as the problem of planning the movement of geographically dispersed military units from their home bases to their final destinations using different transportation assets and a multimodal transportation network while obeying the constraints of a time-phased force deployment data describing the movement requirements for troops and equipment. Our main contribution is to develop a GISbased, object-oriented, loosely-coupled, modular, platformindependent, multi-modal and medium-resolution discrete event simulation model to test the feasibility of deployment scenarios. While our simulation model is not a panacea for all, it allows creation and testing the feasibility of a given scenario under stochastic conditions and can provide insights into potential outcomes in a matter of a few hours.