Scheduling the Operation Desert Storm Airlift: An Advanced Automated Scheduling Support System.

This article focuses on the collaboration between the Airlift Command of the U.S. Air Force with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to develop and deploy the Airlift Deployment Analysis System. The system 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. The challenge is to schedule aircraft, crew and mission support resources to maximize the on-time delivery of cargo and passengers. The result of the partnership between developers and flow planners was an integrated system that flow planners could use to enter and evaluate cargo- and passenger-movement requests; to allocate airlift resources, including aircraft availability, aircraft characteristics, crews, airfield resources and airlift network configurations.