The assignment of minimum crews among bases in an airlift operation

In this paper, the authors formulate a mathematical programming model with the objective of minimizing the number of crews required for the aircraft to complete mission within a specified average time period in an airlift operation conducted by the United States Air Force. Using earlier results of the mean idle time of an aircraft at a single base and the probability distribution of the interdeparture times of the aircraft from the base, an efficient algorithm is applied to solve the problem.