Scheduling the ‘Operation Desert Storm’ airlift: An advanced automated scheduling support system

A typical airlift mission carrying troops and cargo to the Persian Gulf required a three-day round-trip, visited seven or more different airfields, burned almost one million pounds of fuel, and cost $280000. During Operation Desert Storm, the Military Airlift Command (MAC) averaged more than 100 such missions daily as it managed the largest airlift in history. By August 7, 1991, more than 25000 missions had moved more than 966000 passengers and 774000 tons of cargo to and from the Persian Gulf region. Each mission required scheduling aircraft, crew, and mission support resources to maximize the on-time delivery of cargo and passengers. To meet this challenge, MAC worked with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to develop and deploy the Airlift Deployment Analysis System (ADANS). Within three months, ADANS provided a set of decision support tools to manage information on cargo and passengers to be moved and the available resources, as well as tools to schedule missions, to analyze the schedule, and to distribute the schedule to MAC’s worldwide command and control system.