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Scheduling patrol boats and crews for the Royal Australian Navy

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Journal of the Operational Research Society

Abstract

The Royal Australian Navy's Patrol Boat Force carries out essential tasks in the surveillance, policing and defence of Australia's coastal waters. To help the Navy make efficient use of a new generation of boats, the authors have developed optimization procedures to schedule the activities of the boats and their crews. The procedures—embodied in a software system called CBM (‘Crews, Boats, Missions’)—use simulated annealing and specialized heuristic techniques within a multi-stage problem-solving framework. Tests show that CBM is reliable in terms of solution quality, and flexible with respect to the range of scheduling conditions applied. CBM has proved valuable to the Navy as an investigatory tool, and it is planned that it should be adapted for operational use, as part of a decision support system to aid in the ongoing management of patrol boat operations.

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Acknowledgements

Commander Gerry Kelly of the Royal Australian Navy, and Dr Ping Cao of the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organization, were sponsors of the project discussed in this paper. We thank them for their support and encouragement.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences, Canberra ACT, Australia

    M E T Horn

  2. University of Cambridge, Cambridge

    H Jiang

  3. Australian National University, Canberra ACT, Australia

    P Kilby

Authors
  1. M E T Horn
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  2. H Jiang
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  3. P Kilby
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Correspondence to M E T Horn.

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Horn, M., Jiang, H. & Kilby, P. Scheduling patrol boats and crews for the Royal Australian Navy. J Oper Res Soc 58, 1284–1293 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602300

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602300

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