A transportation problem formulation for the MAC Airlift Planning Problem

The Military Airlift Command (MAC) is responsible for planning the allocation of airlift resources for the movement of cargo and passengers. A heuristic algorithm, the Airlift Planning Algorithm (APA), has recently been developed under subcontract to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to assist MAC in scheduling airlift resources. In this paper, the authors present a transportation problem formulation which can be used as a preprocessor to the APA or as an estimator for the APA. This paper examines the robustness and sensitivity of the transportation problem formulation. In particular, the performance of the APA improves by approximately 10% when the transportation problem is used as a preprocessor for two hypothetical problems and improves by up to 50% for derived airlift constrained problems.