Military training resource scheduling: System model, optimal and heuristic decision processes

The United States Army trains thousands of new soldiers each year to fill vacancies in Army organizations. Initial entry training consists of two sequential phases: Basic Combat Training followed by Advanced Individual Training. Until recently, manual heuristic methods were used to schedule hundreds of training companies for initial entry training. We present two approaches for scheduling training resources for the Basic Combat Training phase of initial training. One is a dynamic programming decision model for optimally scheduling training resources. The second is a heuristic procedure implemented in a decision support system. Computational results are given for both approaches. The heuristic provides ‘good’ solutions in terms of three performance measures: training quality as measured by an instructor-to-trainee ratio, resource utilization, and training costs.