Determination of servive schedules for military, considering preferences and hierarchy

The goal of this paper is to present a Binary Integer Linear Programming (BILP) model to solve an Air Force soldiers rostering problem in order to define duty service days for each soldier, considering his or her preferences and military hierarchy rules as well. For the formulation and solving of the BILP problem, a computational program has been developed to serve as an interface between the user and LINGO software, which was used to solve the BILP model. In order to validate the model, many simulations were conducted, using different number of soldiers, weights (priority degrees), daily demands, scales types and the eventual need for having soldiers on call. The results were considered acceptable, by comparing the optimized scales with the ones in use on the occasion of the data collection (those were based on worker's experience). The mathematical model developed can easily be adapted and applied to any kind of military force, due to their similar characteristics.